The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius (1976)

Michael Moorcock's 1976 collection gathers the short fiction about his shape-shifting assassin and dandy Jerry Cornelius. In "The Entropy Circuit" Jerry is stuck in a border town with a consumptive girl-wife, waiting on a visa and on Mo Collier, while everything around him, his watch included, runs down. (Open Library)

Watches

Hamilton Digital Pulsar: In "The Entropy Circuit" Jerry touches the stud of his Pulsar and finds its numerals glowing more faintly: the power cell is failing however carefully he has nursed it. The red display says 5.46 and he lets go before the seconds can register. The push-button red LED display is that of the 1970s Pulsar; the text gives no model.

Source text: He touched the stud of his Pulsar watch; the numerals seemed to glow more faintly and soon the power cell would give out altogether, for all that he had made every effort to preserve it as long as possible. The red numerals said 5.46; he released the stud before the seconds had time to register. (Michael Moorcock, "The Entropy Circuit", in The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius, scan cataloged as Gollancz, 2014, p. 200; the story begins on p. 197; Internet Archive scan OCR)