Probably I would have been aggrieved about it any morning, but today, this Wednesday, May 8, was an occasion of particular personal importance. Besides, it was normally a close forerunner of breakfast, and I was feeling hungry. Much as I disliked the sponging process, and useless as it had been to suggest that the help of a guiding hand as far as the bathroom could eliminate it, its failure to occur was highly disconcerting. Of varying reliability were continuing to strike eight in all directions-and still nobody had shown up. In a public ward the messy proceeding would have taken place a whole unnecessary hour earlier. That was one of the best reasons I had for appreciating a private room. Each second there's someone consulting it on births, deaths, doses, meals, lights, talking, working, sleeping, resting, visiting, dressing, washing-and hitherto it had decreed that someone should begin to wash and tidy me up at exactly three minutes after 7 A.M.

Without a clock the place simply couldn't work. At the time, however, I was only peevish, wondering what in thunder went on, for I had been in the place long enough to know that, next to the matron, the clock is the most sacred thing in a hospital.

But chance played it not only that I should be in hospital at that particular time, but that my eyes, and indeed my whole head, should be wreathed in bandages-and that's why I have to be grateful to whoever orders these averages. It might just as easily have been the week before that-in which case I'd not be writing now: I'd not be here at all. In the nature of things a good many somebodies are always in hospital, and the law of averages had picked on me to be one of them a week or so before. The way I came to miss the end of the world-well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years-was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it. In a leisurely fashion it gave an indisputable eight. Soon another clock began, on a hard, decisive note. But presently I had my first bit of objective evidence-a distant clock stuck what sounded to me just like eight.

After all, the odds were that it was I who was wrong, and not everyone else-though I did not see how that could be. And yet, when I started functioning a little more smartly, I became doubtful. When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

Day of the triffids novel