It was the happiest days of Jane Wilson's life. The giant mushroom she had cultivated in her laboratory - the result of seven years of heard work and painstaking research - was big and protein-rich enough to provide a full day's nourishment. In quantity, her gargantuan vegetable could solve the problem of world hunger. Who knows - she might even win the Nobel Prize. What Jane didn't know was that her genetic experiment had created a monstrous plague. The man-made microbe was loose and proliferating, its microscopic spores carrying the horror to the far reaches of the earth, even beyond the range of nuclear weapons. Victims found their bodies transformed, their minds taken over, haunted by dark obsessions and inhuman desires. And Jane - the only one who could synthesize an antibody - had gone stark raving mad.