There hasn’t been a minute of his life over the past five years when he hasn’t felt a low-grade anxiety buzzing through him. He doesn’t know how best to describe it; it’s very much its own terrible thing. Maybe it’s like standing below an electrical tower for months until your veins feel zapped and frayed. Maybe it’s like standing on top of an ant pile and having them crawl up a hole in your foot and gnaw their way through your body, nesting in all your dark hollows. He can be sitting at a traffic light or reading the Sunday paper and feel sick and worried for no reason at all. He half-does a lot of things. He’ll take his empty bowl of cereal to the sink but leave the glass rimmed with orange juice on the kitchenette table. He’ll start an e-mail response on his phone but then get distracted by a weather alert. He puts on his jacket but doesn’t step into his shoes.

And now? Now he has every reason to worry, so he feels barely functional. He stands in the lab for what might be ten minutes unable to settle on an action. He is at the threshold between believing and not believing what he sees. When he finally does back out and close the door, he opens it again immediately, just to make sure he didn’t imagine it all.

On the one hand, he wants to cry out Holy shit and take a million samples and post photos online and call everybody in the department and tell them to get their asses over here on the double because he’s discovered something new, something impossibly amazing, something that might, just might, save his fight for tenure after all.

But on the other hand—and here’s where the anxiety kicks in—if he shares what he’s found with others before he even knows what he’s looking at, he’ll lose any claim on it. They’ll effectively steal it out from under him.

And on a darker note, the expansion rate and growth pattern are more than troubling—they’re scary. Only twenty-four hours have passed since he was here last. Yes, the lab is climate-controlled, a kind of spacious petri dish meant to encourage fungal habitats, but what he’s seeing is an unprecedented form of metastasis. He remembers something that happened to the department secretary a few months ago. One Monday, she sliced a deep paper cut into her finger at the copy machine. On Tuesday, she had fever and chills. On Wednesday, the cut darkened to black and blue. And by Thursday, when she finally went to the doctor, she learned sepsis had infected her joint and gotten into her bloodstream and she had to have her index finger surgically removed. Things that spread quickly scare him.