When Harry Levine, an aging, unsuccessful Greenwich Village writer is fired from his job as restaurant doorman, he calls on friend and mentor Jake, ostensibly to collect a long-standing debt. Harry solicits his opinion on his latest manuscript, a work of semi-fiction based on their longtime friendship. Although he initially denies having read it, Jake later attacks it on aesthetic grounds, and deep-seated feelings of betrayal and jealousy surface and lead to a traumatic confrontation.

Susan Morrison is getting married to wealthy industrialist Rick Barnes. Danny, her teenage son with ex-husband Frank, isn't happy about this; he stows away in Rick's car one night, planning to go to Frank's house. But while there, he witnesses Rick murdering mysterious stranger Ray Coleman. Problem is, Rick's managed to dispose of most of the evidence, and he's considered a pillar of the community, while Danny has a history of lying. Frank believes him, though, and does some investigating of his...

While returning to Earth, the space shuttle explodes and the fragments bring an alien virus that recodes the human DNA. In Washington, the psychiatrist Carol Bennell observes the modification of the behavior of one of her clients first, then in her former husband and finally in the population in general. Together with her friend Dr. Ben Driscoll the researcher Dr. Stephen Galeano, they discover that the extraterrestrial epidemic affects human beings while sleeping and that her son Ollie, who had...