Wyndham, John

When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off
by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

I felt that from the moment I woke. And yet, when I started
functioning a little more smartly, I became doubtful. 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. I went on waiting, tinged with doubt. But presently I had my
first bit of objective evidence—a distant clock stuck what sounded to me just
like eight. I listened hard and suspiciously. Soon another clock began, on a
hard, decisive note. In a leisurely fashion it gave an indisputable eight. Then
I
knew
things were awry.

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 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. 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. 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. 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.

Without a clock the place simply couldn’t work. 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. That was one of the best reasons I had for
appreciating a private room. In a public ward the messy proceeding would have
taken place a whole unnecessary hour earlier. But here, today, clocks of
varying reliability were continuing to strike eight in all directions—and still
nobody had shown up.

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. Besides, it
was normally a close forerunner of breakfast, and I was feeling hungry.

Probably I would have been aggrieved about it any morning,
but today, this Wednesday, May 8, was an occasion of particular personal
importance. I was doubly anxious to get all the fuss and routine over because
this was the day they were going to take off my bandages.

I groped around a bit to find the bell push and let them
have a full five seconds’ clatter, just to show what I was thinking of them.

While I was waiting for the pretty short-tempered response
that such a peal ought to bring, I went on listening.

The day outside, I realized now, was sounding even more
wrong than I had thought. The noises it made, or failed to make, were more like
Sunday than Sunday itself—and I’d come round again to being absolutely assured
that it
was
Wednesday, whatever else had happened to it.

Why the founders of St. Merryn’s Hospital chose to erect
their institution at a main-road crossing upon a valuable office site, and
thus expose their patients’ nerves to constant laceration, is a foible that I
never properly understood. But for those fortunate enough to be suffering from
complaints unaffected by the wear and tear of continuous traffic, it did have
the advantage that one could lie abed and still not be out of touch, so to
speak, with the flow of life. Customarily the west-bound busses thundered along
trying to beat the lights at the corner; as often as not a pig-squeal of brakes
and a salvo of shots from the silencer would tell that they hadn’t. Then the
released cross traffic would rev and roar as it started up the incline. And
every now and then there would be an interlude: a good grinding bump, followed
by a general stoppage—exceedingly tantalizing to one in my condition, where the
extent of the contretemps had to be judged entirely by the degree of profanity
resulting. Certainly, neither by day nor during most of the night, was there
any chance of a St. Merryn patient being under the impression that the common
round had stopped just because he, personally, was on the shelf for the moment.

But this morning was different. Disturbingly, because

mysteriously, different. No wheels rumbled, no busses
roared, no sound of a car of any kind, in fact, was to be heard; no brakes, no
horns, not even the clopping of the few rare horses that still occasionally
passed; nor, as there should be at such an hour, the composite tramp of
work-bound feet.

The more I listened, the queerer it seemed—and the less I
cared for it. In what I reckoned to be ten minutes of careful listening I heard
five sets of shuffling, hesitating footsteps, three voices bawling
unintelligibly in the distance, and the hysterical sobs of a woman. There was
not the cooing of a pigeon, not the chirp of a sparrow. Nothing but the humming
of wires in the wind.

A nasty, empty feeling began to crawl up inside me. It was
the same sensation I used to have sometimes as a child when I got to fancying
that horrors were lurking in the shadowy corners of the bedroom; when I
daren’t put a foot out for fear that something should reach from under the bed
and grab my ankle; daren’t even reach for the switch lest the movement should
cause something to leap at me. I had to fight down the feeling, just as I had
had to when I was a kid in the dark. And it was no easier. It’s surprising how
much you don’t grow out of when it comes to the test. The elemental fears were
still marching along with me, waiting their chance, and pretty nearly getting
it—just because my eyes were bandaged and the traffic had stopped. .

When I had pulled myself together a bit, I tried the reasonable
approach. Why
does
traffic stop? Well, usually because the road is
closed for repairs. Perfectly simple. Any time now they’d be along with
pneumatic drills as another touch of aural variety for the long-suffering
patients. But the trouble with the reasonable line was that it went further. It
pointed out that there was not even the distant hum of traffic, not the whistle
of a train, not the hoot of a tugboat. Just nothing—until the clocks began
chiming a quarter past eight.

The temptation to take a peep—not more than a peep, of
course; just enough to get some idea of what on earth could be happening—was
immense. But I restrained it. For one thing, a peep was a far less simple
matter than it sounded. It wasn’t just a case of lifting a blindfold: there
were a lot of pads and bandages. But, more important, I was scared to try. Over
a week’s complete blindness can do a lot to frighten you out of taking chances
with your sight. It was true that they intended to remove the bandages today,
but that would be done in a special dim light, and they would allow them to stay
off only if the inspection of my eyes were satisfactory.

I did not know whether it would be. It might be that
my sight was permanently impaired. Or that I would not be able to see at all. I
did not know yet.

I swore and laid hold of the bell push again. It helped to
relieve my feelings a bit.

No one, it seemed, was interested in bells. I began to get
as much sore as worried. It’s humiliating to be dependent, anyway, but it’s a
still poorer pass to have no one to depend on. My patience was whittling down.
Something, I decided, had got to be done about it.

If I were to bawl down the passage and generally raise hell,
somebody ought to show up if only to tell me what they thought of me. I turned
back the sheet and got out of bed. I’d never seen the room I was in, and though
I had a fairly good idea by ear of the position of the door, it wasn’t all that
easy to find. There seemed to be several puzzling and unnecessary obstacles,
but I got across at the cost of a stubbed toe and minor damage to my shin. I
shoved out into the passage.

“Hey!” I shouted. “I want some breakfast. Room forty-eight!”

For a moment nothing happened. Then came voices all shouting
together. It sounded like hundreds of them, and not a word coming through
clearly. It was as though I’d put on a record of crowd noises—and an
ill-disposed crowd, at that. I had a nightmarish flash, wondering whether I had
been transferred to a mental home while I was sleeping and that this was not
St. Merryn’s Hospital at all. The sound of those voices simply didn’t sound
normal to me. I closed the door hurriedly on the babel and groped my way back
to bed. At that moment bed seemed to be the one safe, comforting thing in my
whole baffling environment. As if to underline that, there came a sound which
checked me in the act of pulling up the sheets. From the street below rose a
scream, wildly distraught and contagiously terrifying. It came three times, and
when it had died away it seemed still to tingle in the air.

I shuddered. I could feel the sweat prickle my forehead
under the bandages. I knew now that something fearful and horrible was
happening. I could not stand my isolation and helplessness any longer. I had to
know what was going on around me. My hands went up to my bandages; then, with
my fingers on the safety pins, I stopped.

Suppose the treatment had not been successful? Suppose that
when I took the bandages off I were to find that I still could not see? That
would be worse still—a hundred times worse....I lacked the courage to be alone
and find out that they had not saved my sight. And even if they had, would it
be safe yet to keep my eyes uncovered?

I dropped my hands and lay back. I was mad at myself and the
place, and I did some silly, weak cursing.

Some little while must have passed before I got a proper
hold on things again, but after a bit I found myself churning round in my mind
once more after a possible explanation. I did not find it
.
But I did
become absolutely convinced that, come all the paradoxes of hell, it was
Wednesday. For the previous day had been notable, and I could swear that no
more than a single night had passed since then.

You’ll find it in the records that on Tuesday, May 7, the
Earth’s orbit passed through a cloud of comet debris. You can even believe it,
if you like—millions did. Maybe it was so
.
I can’t prove anything either
way. II was in no state to see what happened myself; but I do have my own
ideas. All that I actually know of the occasion is that I had to spend the
evening in my bed listening to eyewitness accounts of what was constantly
claimed to be the most remarkable celestial spectacle on record.

And yet, until the thing actually began, nobody had ever
heard a word about this supposed comet, or its debris.

Why they broadcast it, considering that everyone who could
walk, hobble, or be carried was either out of doors or at windows enjoying the
greatest free firework display ever, I don’t know. But they did, and it helped
to impress on me still more heavily what it meant to be sightless. I got around
to feeling that if the treatment had not been successful I’d rather end the
whole thing than go on that way.

It was reported in the news bulletins during the day that
mysterious bright green flashes had been seen in the Californian skies the
previous night. However, such a lot of things did happen in California that no
one could be expected to get greatly worked up over that, but as further
reports came in, this comet-debris motif made its appearance, and it stuck.

Accounts arrived from all over the Pacific of a night made
brilliant by green meteors said to be “sometimes in such numerous showers that
the whole sky appeared to be wheeling about us.” And so it was, when you come
to think of it.

As the nightline moved westward the brilliance of the display
was in no way decreased. Occasional green flashes became visible even before
darkness fell. The announcer, giving an account of the phenomenon in the six
o’clock news, advised everyone that it was an amazing scene and one not to he missed.
He mentioned also that it seemed to be interfering seriously with shortwave
reception at long distances, but that the medium waves on which there would be
a running commentary were unaffected, as, at present, was television. He need
not have troubled with the advice. By the way everyone in the hospital got
excited about it, it seemed to me that there was not the least likelihood of
anybody missing it—except myself.

And as if the radio’s comments were not enough, the nurse
who brought me my supper had to tell me all about it.

“The sky’s simply full of shooting stars.” she said. “All
bright green. They make people’s faces look frightfully ghastly. Everybody’s
out watching them, and sometimes it’s almost as light as day—only all the wrong
color. Even’ now and then there’s a big one so bright that it hurts to look at
it. It’s a marvelous sight. ‘They say there’s never been anything like it
before. It is such a pity you can’t see it, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I agreed somewhat shortly.

“We’ve drawn back the curtains in the wards so that they can
all see it,” she went on. “If only you hadn’t those bandages you’d have a
wonderful view of it from here.”

“Oh,” I said.

“But it must be better still outside, though. They say thousands
of people are out in the parks and on the heath watching it all. And on all
the flat roofs you can see people standing and looking up.”

“How long do they expect it to go on?” I asked patiently.

“I don’t know, but they say it’s not so bright now as it was
in other places. Still, even if you’d had your bandages off today, I don’t
expect they’d have let you watch it. You’ll have to take things gently at
first, and some of the flashes are very bright. “They————Ooooh!”