Hoping to end starvation, Challenger becomes the first human subject to test his new experimental substitute for food. But his nutritional beverage is not as successful for him as it was for his lab mice, and he quickly becomes obsessed with discovering the reason why. Then obsession leads to madness as Challenger is confronted by two opposing hallucinations. The first is a vision of himself as a young, driven scientist. The second is his beloved wife, Jessie, as he left her in London three years earlier. Unconscious and near death, Challenger is finally discovered by his friends. But will their limited medical knowledge be enough to reverse the ravages of his experiment, without placing him in even greater peril?