In the office, I felt dirty and alien, a vile thing in sterile surroundings. I would always wash thoroughly before I set out to the shop but that didn’t make me any cleaner. My clothes were disgustingly filthy anyway. I would always cringe from the office staff with an embarrassment equal to the awkwardness I felt in the factory.
    Still it was the one small joy amid the horror of my life and therefore—necessarily—I was betrayed by it. One day as I scurried up to the office, I slipped on the stairs and tumbled all the way down to the bottom again in a cascade of ham and lettuce sandwiches and pies and sauce and cream vanilla slices. When I came to rest and untangled myself, I discovered that a bottle of flavoured milk had snapped off at the neck and its jagged edges had completely impaled my hand. At least it was chocolate milk—my favourite.

 

Apocalyptic yarns—apart from the religious sort—date back at least to Arthur Conan Doyle, whose four intrepid adventurers from The Lost World—Professors Challenger and Summerlee, Lord John Roxton and Ed Malone—were back to take on The Poison Belt, which envelopes the globe and kills everyone except our heroes because Challenger has foreseen it and creates an oxygen chamber. But it is all very disappointing by comparison, mostly when it is discovered that everyone is not dead but only sleeping. Doyle wrote a number of these—The Marcot Deep, The Disintergration Machine, When the World Screamed and The Land of Mist mostly follow on from The Lost World style of thing, but that are infinitely inferior to that fine work in every respect. Let them, along with those serious novels that competed so disastrously with Sherlock, fade away into the poison mists of time.