The Fungus Read online

  Tonight, however, he didn’t feel like rubbing his painfully distended belly against anyone, no matter how young, soft and female they might be. In fact he didn’t even feel up to helping the staff, he just wanted to collapse. And so, after a brief clear-up in the Lounge, which consisted mainly of wiping the table where the attractive blonde had been sitting and picking up her glass, which still contained several mouthfuls of wine, he said goodnight to his staff and headed upstairs to bed.

  As he climbed the stairs his belly rumbled and he let out a tremendous fart. He was already regretting not being able to resist swallowing the remains of the blonde’s red wine before washing the glass. On top of the dozen or so pints of Bottom Draught he’d consumed that evening the small amount of wine could turn out to be the alcoholic straw that broke the camel’s back.

  He sat down heavily on the big, sagging double-bed, tugged off his shoes then collapsed backward, not bothering to undress. As he drifted quickly off to sleep he thought briefly of Marianne, as he always did at this time, even though it had been eight years since his late wife had shared the double-bed with him. There had been no one else since then.

  During the night, as he slept, the live yeasts in the beer that filled his stomach and intestine underwent a remarkable molecular change. . . .

  Yeast, the only fungus that grows by budding rather than by producing the long tendrils called hyphae, is also the fastest growing fungus with the theoretical ability to increase a thousand fold in 24 hours. The transformed yeasts in Eric’s stomach, however, were now capable of growing at a hundred times that rate.

  Which is what they were proceeding to do.

  Feeding first on the sugar in the contents of Eric’s stomach the yeasts budded and grew at a phenomenal speed, producing more alcohol as a waste product as well as a considerable amount of carbon dioxide gas.

  Then, when the transformed yeast fungi had exhausted the supply of sugar within his stomach they began to break down the cells of the stomach wall and the intestinal linings. If Eric had been awake it would have felt as if his internal organs were on fire but, mercifully for him, the large amount of extra alcohol created by the yeast had already put him into deep unconsciousness.

  Then, slowly at first but then much more quickly, Eric Gifford began to ferment.

  And as he fermented his body expanded . . .

  Just after 4 a.m. Eric’s staff were woken by a muffled but powerful explosion which seemed to come from their employer’s bedroom. All five of them gathered in the passageway outside his room. They banged on the door and called out his name but there was no response. Finally the bravest among them opened the door. Immediately a horrifically strong yeasty stench poured out of the room, making them gag.

  Choking, two of them reluctantly entered the room and switched on the light. The others crowded around the doorway.

  To begin with none of them could comprehend what they were looking at. Then one of the girls screamed and ran down the passageway.

  Eric Gifford’s head, one of his arms, and both of his legs still lay on the bed but the rest of him was spread fairly thickly over the ceiling, walls and floors.

  And in the depression in the bed created by his 250-pound bulk over the years lay a bubbling and seething white mass.

  Wednesday, 2.15 a.m.

  Naseem and his brother Dinesh had managed to clear the last customer out of the restaurant by 2.00 a.m. and were now helping Maheed, their uncle, clean up in the kitchen.

  Naseem was exhausted. He disliked working these long hours but it was the only way he’d be able to save enough money to return to Delhi for good. His other uncle, Makund, who owned the restaurant, as well as two others, was not an easy man to work for but he paid well if you worked hard.

  His brother Dinesh was humming a new Indian pop song as he finished scouring the stove. Naseem regarded him wearily, envying him his energy and his continual high spirits. Dinesh was a mystery to him in many ways. For one thing he seemed quite content to stay on in England and had hopes of opening up a restaurant of his own. To Naseem the idea of spending the rest of his working life in this depressing, gray country and waiting on its increasingly surly and ill-mannered inhabitants was profoundly depressing.

  He remembered the two men he’d served earlier that night, the fat one and the thin one, and scowled. “Pigs,” he muttered. “Why do we get so many pigs in this place?”

  Dinesh laughed. “Because it is place that makes pig food.” He gestured at the food scrap container which was full up again. Naseem sighed and went and picked it up. “The pigs that eat this are probably better behaved than the ones who sit in the restaurant.”

  He carried the bin out the back door and into the alley. He was just about to empty the smaller bin into the bigger one when he paused and blinked several times. But the apparition refused to go away.

  The big cylindrical bin was covered with huge growths that looked like giant toadstools. They were about 18 inches high and a foot wide. They were sprouting out of the top of the bin and down its side like frozen beer foam.

  Naseem stared at them in amazement. They hadn’t been there when he’d last emptied the kitchen scraps . . . when? Less than three hours ago?

  He called to the others. The tone of his voice brought them out at a run. They reacted to the sight in the same way he did.

  After a long pause Dinesh said, “What is that stuff? Where did it all come from?”

  Naseem shook his head. “I don’t know. It wasn’t here before. It’s grown very suddenly.”

  They both looked to the older man for enlightenment, hoping that their uncle had encountered something like this in the past. But he seemed as astonished as they were. “They’re like mushrooms. Like giant mushrooms,” he said slowly.

  “More like toadstools,” said Naseem doubtfully. “Toadstools can grow this big, can’t they?”

  Dinesh disappeared into the kitchen and returned wielding a broom. “We must destroy them.”

  “No, wait,” said Naseem, stepping in front of him. “Perhaps we should call the Health men. Those things are not normal.”

  “The Health men would close us down,” said their uncle. “And my brother would have our skins. We cannot tell anyone about this.” He nodded to Dinesh. “Go on, get rid of them.”

  Dinesh pushed past Naseem and began to energetically attack the growths with the broom. As the broom struck them the larger fungi burst with a dry popping sound, releasing a faintly luminous cloud of green powder. Very soon the whole alley was filled with the dust and all three men were covered with it.

  Dinesh continued with his flailing until all the growths were gone and only powder remained. This he swept up and dumped into the big container. By 3.00 a.m. no visible trace of the fungi remained, either on the ground or in the air. A breeze had sprung up and the cloud of tiny fungi fragments had been carried away.

  By 3.30 a.m. the billions of particles were spreading over the West End of London . . . and beyond.

  5

  Tuesday, 5.20 p.m.

  How it began . . .

  It was the happiest day of Jane Wilson’s life. As she stood there in the laboratory cradling the organism in her arms she couldn’t remember ever feeling this elated before, even at the birth of her son Simon.

  She was holding a specimen of agaricus bisporus, a species of fungus more commonly known as a “cultivated” mushroom. But it was no ordinary specimen. For one thing its pileus, or cap—which was resting against her left breast—was over a foot in diameter, and the stipe, or stalk was over two feet long and seven inches thick. Altogether it weighed nearly four pounds.

  It differed in another more important way from an ordinary agaricus bisporus—this mushroom was protein rich, yielding almost as much usable protein per gram as poultry flesh.

  It was the result of seven years hard work and research but at last she’d succeeded. Two hours ago the giant mushroom she was now hugging to her breast had been a tiny spore of almost microscopic size sitting in
its tray of nutrient jelly. And now, just a short time later, it was big and protein rich enough to provide one person with enough food for a day.

  Jane felt tears rolling down her face. No one had a right to be this happy, she told herself. “Oh baby, baby,” she whispered to the fungus, hugging it harder, “You are beautiful, and you’re mine . . . all mine.”

  Then she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass wall that sealed off this section of the laboratory and felt momentarily embarrassed. “Hell, I look like the Madonna with Child,” she muttered to herself, “. . . positively downright beatific.”

  It was time to stop acting like an emotional fool, she decided, and start behaving like a scientist again. The self-congratulations could come later. There was still work to do.

  She took the mushroom to a nearby table and laid it out, almost reverently, in a large enamel tray. Then, with a scalpel, she cut a small section out from the edge of the cap. It wasn’t an easy thing for her to do—to mutilate her perfect creation in this way—but it had to be done.

  She turned the section over in her hands and examined the gills on the underside of the cap. Her heart sank a little. The section was enlarged enough for her to see with the naked eye the hymenium covering the surface of the gills. The hymenium is the substance from which the basidium grow—the basidium being the micro-organisms that form the mushroom spores. An ordinary mushroom can eject spores at the rate of half a million a minute during the two or three days of its active life but Jane could see that the hymenium on this super-sized specimen was under-developed.

  Nervously, she sliced a small sliver from the gill section and placed it under a microscope. Her heart sank still further. The microscope confirmed her fear. The hymenium was not forming any spore cells. She sighed and rested her chin on her hands. So her triumph was not yet 100% successful. She, and her small team of assistants, had succeeded in creating a giant, fast-growing, protein rich mushroom but the genetically engineered organism that produced these traits obviously inhibited the mushroom’s reproductive cycle.

  Originally Jane and her team had attempted to reach their goal by genetically altering the mushroom spore cell itself but nearly four years of effort produced no worthwhile results. Unravelling the genetic code of an organism even as simple as the agaricus bisporus fungus was a monumental task that Jane finally realized they lacked the resources to successfully accomplish. Unless she was given an extra 20 people and unlimited funds—both of which she knew were out of the question—they might still be trying to crack the code in 10 years’ time.

  So Jane had decided to try another approach. Instead of trying to alter the whole organism genetically she instructed her assistants that from then on they would approach the problem from a different angle and concentrate on only one aspect of the mushroom’s metabolism. They would isolate the enzymes that helped to control the mushroom’s size, growth rate, and protein retention level, and then try and modify them accordingly.

  Isolating the specific enzymes—and fortunately there were only two—took a further 12 months. Jane and her team then began to try and build an artificial enzyme that would supersede the functions of the two existing ones within the a. bisporus cells and accelerate the relevant processes at least a hundred-fold.

  It had been a long and painstaking job recombining the DNA strands of the enzymes in an attempt to create the desired chemical structure that would in turn act like a supercatalyst within the mushroom. Enzymes, however, are extremely unstable; their crucial three-dimensional structures often falling apart in only a few hours.

  To overcome this problem Jane and her team were obliged to build, finally, a micro-organism that was more like a virus in structure than an ordinary enzyme. But even when they’d succeeded in creating this unusually stable macro-enzyme they had yet to hit upon the precise chemical combination of the four basic chemical sub-units of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, that would produce the desired effects in the mushroom.

  So the last 18 months had been spent in testing different versions of the enzyme on the a. bisporus spore cells. Each manufactured enzyme had differed from the others in only the smallest and subtlest ways in their atomic structure but when introduced to the spores they produced widely differing changes in the mushrooms, many of them drastic but none of them the required ones. Until now.

  Now, with Enzyme Batch CT-UTE-8471 they’d hit the jackpot. Or almost. . . .

  Jane regarded the giant mushroom thoughtfully. Even though the enlarged specimen’s reproduction system had been retarded in some way by the accelerated growth process it was still a considerable and historic achievement. And it was possible that the reproductive system had merely been slowed down by the modified catalyst. Tomorrow she would grow another specimen but leave it attached to the mycelium—the fungoid equivalent of roots—for a longer period.

  Even if reproduction had been completely inhibited by the new enzyme it was possible that further modification to the enzyme structure would solve the problem. And even if it didn’t it wouldn’t seriously affect her achievement in the long term, she now realized. If the enzyme could be manufactured in large quantities cheaply—and she saw no reason why it couldn’t be—then it would simply be a case of applying it to the mushroom cultivation trays containing ordinary a. bisporus spores, perhaps in the form of a spray, in order to grow any number of the giant variety.

  She leaned back on the stool, straightened her back and stretched her arms above her head. She grinned, her feeling of elation returning. Okay, so she hadn’t been 100% successful but she was so close it didn’t matter. She had created a new and plentiful source of cheap protein that would greatly alleviate the world food shortage. And—who knows?—might lead to a Nobel Prize.

  Of course she would have to share the award with her three assistants, Rachel, Tod and Hilary . . . what a shame for them they hadn’t been in the lab to witness the actual moment of success but she had sent them all home at lunchtime. They had been working around the clock for the previous 24 hours testing a new series of enzyme batches. All had proved negative and it was only on a whim that Jane, by then alone, decided to try just one more variation before going home herself.

  She stood up and smiled at the mushroom. She would leave it there on the tray for them to see when they arrived in the morning. The expressions on their faces would be something to remember.

  In the meantime she was going to savor her triumph all by herself. It would be exclusively hers for the next 18 hours or so.

  She felt a momentary pang that she couldn’t share it with Barry but all that was finished now, probably for good. True, it was supposed to be a ‘trial’ separation but she couldn’t see them ever getting back together again. The last year before the break-up had been hell. She knew she was partly to blame—her involvement with her research had become obsessive—but Barry could have been more supportive instead of acting like a spoiled brat. He knew how important her work was, not just for her but possibly for the whole of mankind, yet he persisted with his ridiculous behavior.

  The real problem, she now realized, was that he deeply resented the success she had made of her career. Mycology, after all, had been his field too but it was she who had attracted all the attention, right from the start, with her Ph.D. paper The Relationship Between Fungi and Mankind: Areas of Potential Exploitation in Agriculture and Industry, and subsequently received the research grants and a department of her own while he had just plodded on doing basic research.

  Well, perhaps he was happier now writing his childish thrillers over in Ireland. She knew his books were beginning to enjoy a popularity of sorts—but what a waste! Imagine spending your time producing escapist fantasies for emotionally retarded adults when you could be doing something useful with your life.

  She gave the mushroom one last lingering look then went to the door. It slid open at the touch of a button. She stepped through into a small room enclosed by frosted glass. As the door slid shut behind her there was a hissing sound from above.
A harmless but powerful anti-bacteria gas was being fed into the room. She began to strip off her clothes—the rubber gloves, the plastic cap, the face mask, the long white gown, the paper briefs and then finally the plastic overshoes and slippers. The reusable items went into the sterilizer, the non-reusable into a small electric incinerator.

  Then she stepped into a shower cubicle and turned on the water, which also contained anti-bacteria agents.

  As she soaped herself thoroughly she gave her body an indifferent inspection. Despite her 31 years and two children it was still a good body with long, well-shaped legs, firm stomach and large but equally firm breasts. Once she had been proud of her body but now her looks, and even her sexuality, rarely impinged on her consciousness.

  This had been another point of contention with Barry. “Making love to you is like making love to the mattress,” he had accused her. “And you know why? Because you’re sublimating your sex drive in your damn work! Your body may leave the lab occasionally but your mind stays in there 24 hours a day. All you’re ever really thinking about are your precious fungi. Hell, the only way now I could turn you on would be to dress up as a fucking fungus myself, phallus impudicus preferably.”

  She had told him he was talking nonsense but deep down knew there was some justification in what he’d said. But it couldn’t be helped—the work had to be continued at that fast pace. She promised herself that once she achieved her goal and the pressure lessened she would try and make it up to Barry. But, of course, the marriage had collapsed well before that had happened.

  By the time she’d finished showering her thoughts had left Barry and returned to the fungus lying on the lab table. As she walked naked to a second glass door and then stepped through into a small changing room she was thinking that tomorrow she would try the enzyme on a specimen of agaricus campestris, the ordinary field mushroom which was very similar to the cultivated variety but actually a different species. It was possible that the reproduction-inhibiting factor might be only present in a. bisporus. . . .