Legions In Time
Michael Swanwick
Michael Swanwick
Legions In Time
Eleanor Voigt had the oddest job of anyone she knew. She worked eight hours a day in an office where no business was done. Her job was to sit at a desk and stare at the closet door. There was a button on the desk that she was to push if anybody came out that door. There was a big clock on the wall, and, precisely at noon, once a day, she went over to the door and unlocked it with a key she had been given. Inside was an empty closet. There were no trap doors or secret panels in it–she had looked. It was just an empty closet.
If she noticed anything unusual, she was supposed to go back to her desk and press the button.
"Unusual in what way?" she’d asked when she’d been hired. "I don’t understand. What am I looking for?"
"You’ll know it when you see it," Mr. Tarblecko had said in that odd accent of his. Mr. Tarblecko was her employer, and some kind of foreigner. He was the creepiest thing imaginable. He had pasty white skin and no hair at all on his head, so that when he took his hat off, he looked like some species of mushroom. His ears were small and almost pointed. Ellie thought he might have some kind of disease. But he paid two dollars an hour, which was good money nowadays for a woman of her age.
At the end of her shift, she was relieved by an unkempt young man who had once blurted out to her that he was a poet. When she came in, in the morning, a heavy Negress would stand up wordlessly, take her coat and hat from the rack, and, with enormous dignity, leave.
So all day Ellie sat behind the desk with nothing to do. She wasn’t allowed to read a book, for fear she might get so involved in it that she would stop watching the door. Crosswords were allowed, because they weren’t as engrossing. She got a lot of knitting done, and was considering taking up tatting.
Over time, the door began to loom large in her imagination. She pictured herself unlocking it at some forbidden not-noon time and seeing–what? Her imagination failed her. No matter how vividly she visualized it, the door would open onto something mundane. Brooms and mops. Sports equipment.
Galoshes and old clothes. What else would there be in a closet? What else could there be?
Sometimes, caught up in her imaginings, she would find herself on her feet. Sometimes, she walked to the door. Once, she actually put her hand on the knob before drawing away. But always the thought of losing her job stopped her.
It was maddening.
Twice, Mr. Tarblecko had come to the office while she was on duty. Each time, he was wearing that same black suit with that same narrow black tie. "You have a watch?" he’d asked.
"Yes, sir." The first time, she’d held forth her wrist to show it to him. The disdainful way he ignored the gesture ensured she did not repeat it on his second visit.
"Go away. Come back in forty minutes."
So she had gone out to a little tearoom nearby. She had a bag lunch back in her desk, with a baloney-and-mayonnaise sandwich and an apple, but she’d been so flustered she’d forgotten it, and then feared to go back after it. She’d treated herself to a dainty "lady lunch" that she was in no mood to appreciate, left a dime tip for the waitress, and was back in front of the office door exactly thirty-eight minutes after she’d left.
At forty minutes, exactly, she reached for the door.
As if he’d been waiting for her to do so, Mr. Tarblecko breezed through the door, putting on his hat. He didn’t acknowledge her promptness or her presence. He just strode briskly past, as though she didn’t exist.
Stunned, she went inside, closed the door, and returned to her desk.
She realized then that Mr. Tarblecko was genuinely, fabulously rich. He had the arrogance of those who are so wealthy that they inevitably get their way in all small matters because there’s always somebody there to arrange things that way. His type was never grateful for anything and never bothered to be polite, because it never even occurred to them that things could be otherwise.
The more she thought about it, the madder she got. She was no Bolshevik, but it seemed to her that people had certain rights, and that one of these was the right to a little common courtesy. It diminished one to be treated like a stick of furniture. It was degrading. She was damned if she was going to take it.
Six months went by.
The door opened and Mr. Tarblecko strode in, as if he’d left only minutes ago. "You have a watch?"
Ellie slid open a drawer and dropped her knitting into it. She opened another and took out her bag lunch. "Yes."
"Go away. Come back in forty minutes."
So she went outside. It was May, and Central Park was only a short walk away, so she ate there, by the little pond where children floated their toy sailboats. But all the while she fumed. She was a good employee–she really was! She was conscientious, punctual, and she never called in sick. Mr.
Tarblecko ought to appreciate that. He had no business treating her the way he did.
Almost, she wanted to overstay lunch, but her conscience wouldn’t allow that. When she got back to the office, precisely thirty-nine and a half minutes after she’d left, she planted herself squarely in front of the door so that when Mr. Tarblecko left he would have no choice but to confront her. It might well lose her her job, but ... well, if it did, it did. That’s how strongly she felt about it.
Thirty seconds later, the door opened and Mr. Tarblecko strode briskly out. Without breaking his stride, or, indeed, showing the least sign of emotion, he picked her up by her two arms, swiveled effortlessly, and deposited her to the side.
Then he was gone. Ellie heard his footsteps dwindling down the hall.
The nerve! The sheer, raw gall of the man!
Ellie went back in the office, but she couldn’t make herself sit down at the desk. She was far too upset. Instead, she walked back and forth the length of the room, arguing with herself, saying aloud those things she should have said and would have said if only Mr. Tarblecko had stood still for them. To be picked up and set aside like that ... well, it was really quite upsetting. It was intolerable.
What was particularly distressing was that there wasn’t even any way to make her displeasure known.
At last, though, she calmed down enough to think clearly, and realized that she was wrong. There was something–something more symbolic than substantive, admittedly–that she could do.
She could open that door.
Ellie did not act on impulse. She was a methodical woman. So she thought the matter through before she did anything. Mr. Tarblecko very rarely showed up at the office–only twice in all the time she’d been here, and she’d been here over a year. Moreover, the odds of him returning to the office a third time only minutes after leaving it were negligible. He had left nothing behind–she could see that at a glance; the office was almost Spartan in its emptiness. Nor was there any work here for him to return to.
Just to be safe, though, she locked the office door. Then she got her chair out from behind the desk and chocked it up under the doorknob, so that even if somebody had a key, he couldn’t get in.
She put her ear to the door and listened for noises in the hall.
Nothing.
It was strange how, now that she had decided to do the deed, time seemed to slow and the office to expand. It took forever to cross the vast expanses of empty space between her and the closet door.
Her hand reaching for its knob pushed through air as thick as molasses. Her fingers closed about it, one by one, and in the time it took for them to do so, there was room enough for a hundred second thoughts. Faintly, she heard the sound of ... machinery? A low humming noise.
She placed the key in the lock, and opened the door.
There stood Mr. Tarblecko.
Ellie s
hrieked, and staggered backward. One of her heels hit the floor wrong, and her ankle twisted, and she almost fell. Her heart was hammering so furiously her chest hurt.
Mr. Tarblecko glared at her from within the closet. His face was as white as a sheet of paper.
"One rule," he said coldly, tonelessly. "You had only one rule, and you broke it." He stepped out.
"You are a very bad slave."
"I ... I ... I ..." Ellie found herself gasping from the shock. "I’m not a slave at all!"
"There is where you are wrong, Eleanor Voigt. There is where you are very wrong indeed," said Mr.
Tarblecko. "Open the window."
Ellie went to the window and pulled up the blinds. There was a little cactus in a pot on the windowsill. She moved it to her desk. Then she opened the window. It stuck a little, so she had to put all her strength into it. The lower sash went up slowly at first and then, with a rush, slammed to the top. A light, fresh breeze touched her.
"Climb onto the windowsill."
"I most certainly will–" not, she was going to say. But to her complete astonishment, she found herself climbing up onto the sill. She could not help herself. It was as if her will were not her own.
"Sit down with your feet outside the window."
It was like a hideous nightmare, the kind that you know can’t be real and struggle to awaken from, but cannot. Her body did exactly as it was told to do. She had absolutely no control over it.
"Do not jump until I tell you to do so."
"Are you going to tell me to jump?" she asked quaveringly. "Oh, please, Mr. Tarblecko ..."
"Now look down."
The office was on the ninth floor. Ellie was a lifelong New Yorker, so that had never seemed to her a particularly great height before. Now it did. The people on the sidewalk were as small as ants. The buses and automobiles on the street were the size of matchboxes. The sounds of horns and engines drifted up to her, and birdsong as well, the lazy background noises of a spring day in the city. The ground was so terribly far away! And there was nothing between her and it but air!
Nothing holding her back from death but her fingers desperately clutching the window frame!
Ellie could feel all the world’s gravity willing her toward the distant concrete. She was dizzy with vertigo and a sick, stomach-tugging urge to simply let go and, briefly, fly. She squeezed her eyes shut tight, and felt hot tears streaming down her face.
She could tell from Mr. Tarblecko’s voice that he was standing right behind her. "If I told you to jump, Eleanor Voigt, would you do so?"
"Yes," she squeaked.
"What kind of person jumps to her death simply because she’s been told to do so?"
"A ... a slave!"
"Then what are you?"
"A slave! A slave! I’m a slave!" She was weeping openly now, as much from humiliation as from fear. "I don’t want to die! I’ll be your slave, anything, whatever you say!"
"If you’re a slave, then what kind of slave should you be?"
"A ... a ... good slave."
"Come back inside."
Gratefully, she twisted around, and climbed back into the office. Her knees buckled when she tried to stand, and she had to grab at the windowsill to keep from falling. Mr. Tarblecko stared at her, sternly and steadily.
"You have been given your only warning," he said. "If you disobey again–or if you ever try to quit–I will order you out the window."
He walked into the closet and closed the door behind him.
There were two hours left on her shift–time enough, barely, to compose herself. When the disheveled young poet showed up, she dropped her key in her purse and walked past him without so much as a glance. Then she went straight to the nearest hotel bar, and ordered a gin and tonic.
She had a lot of thinking to do.
Eleanor Voigt was not without resources. She had been an executive secretary before meeting her late husband, and everyone knew that a good executive secretary effectively runs her boss’s business for him. Before the Crash, she had run a household with three servants. She had entertained. Some of her parties had required weeks of planning and preparation. If it weren’t for the Depression, she was sure she’d be in a much better-paid position than the one she held.
She was not going to be a slave.
But before she could find a way out of her predicament, she had to understand it. First, the closet. Mr. Tarblecko had left the office and then, minutes later, popped up inside it. A hidden passage of some kind? No–that was simultaneously too complicated and not complicated enough. She had heard machinery, just before she opened the door. So ... some kind of transportation device, then. Something that a day ago she would have sworn couldn’t exist. A teleporter, perhaps, or a time machine.
The more she thought of it, the better she liked the thought of the time machine. It was not just that teleporters were the stuff of Sunday funnies and Buck Rogers serials, while The Time Machine was a distinguished philosophical work by Mr. H.G. Wells. Though she had to admit that figured in there. But a teleportation device required a twin somewhere, and Mr. Tarblecko hadn’t had the time even to leave the building.
A time machine, however, would explain so much! Her employer’s long absences. The necessity that the device be watched when not in use, lest it be employed by Someone Else. Mr. Tarblecko’s abrupt appearance today, and his possession of a coercive power that no human being on Earth had.
The fact that she could no longer think of Mr. Tarblecko as human.
She had barely touched her drink, but now she found herself too impatient to finish it. She slapped a dollar bill down on the bar and, without waiting for her change, left.
During the time it took to walk the block and a half to the office building and ride the elevator up to the ninth floor, Ellie made her plans. She strode briskly down the hallway and opened the door without knocking. The unkempt young man looked up, startled, from a scribbled sheet of paper.
"You have a watch?"
"Y-yes, but ... Mr. Tarblecko ..."
"Get out. Come back in forty minutes."
With grim satisfaction, she watched the young man cram his key into one pocket and the sheet of paper into another and leave. Good slave, she thought to herself. Perhaps he’d already been through the little charade Mr. Tarblecko had just played on her. Doubtless every employee underwent ritual enslavement as a way of keeping them in line. The problem with having slaves, however, was that they couldn’t be expected to display any initiative... . Not on the master’s behalf, anyway.
Ellie opened her purse and got out the key. She walked to the closet.
For an instant, she hesitated. Was she really sure enough to risk her life? But the logic was unassailable. She had been given no second chance. If Mr. Tarblecko knew she was about to open the door a second time, he would simply have ordered her out the window on her first offense. The fact that he hadn’t meant that he didn’t know.
She took a deep breath and opened the door.
There was a world inside.
For what seemed like forever, Ellie stood staring at the bleak metropolis so completely unlike New York City. Its buildings were taller than any she had ever seen–miles high!–and interlaced with skywalks, like those in Metropolis. But the buildings in the movie had been breathtaking, and these were the opposite of beautiful. They were ugly as sin: windowless, grey, stained, and discolored. There were monotonous lines of harsh lights along every street, and under their glare trudged men and women as uniform and lifeless as robots. Outside the office, it was a beautiful bright day. But on the other side of the closet, the world was dark as night.
And it was snowing.
Gingerly, she stepped into the closet. The instant her foot touched the floor, it seemed to expand to all sides. She stood at the center of a great wheel of doors, with all but two of them–to her office and to the winter world–shut. There were hooks beside each door, and hanging from them were costumes of a hundred different cultures. She thought she
recognized togas, Victorian opera dress, kimonos... . But most of the clothing was unfamiliar.
Beside the door into winter, there was a long cape. Ellie wrapped it around herself, and discovered a knob on the inside. She twisted it to the right, and suddenly the coat was hot as hot. Quickly, she twisted the knob to the left, and it grew cold. She fiddled with the thing until the cape felt just right. Then she straightened her shoulders, took a deep breath, and stepped out into the forbidding city.
There was a slight electric sizzle, and she was standing in the street.
Ellie spun around to see what was behind her: a rectangle of some glassy black material. She rapped it with her knuckles. It was solid. But when she brought her key near its surface, it shimmered and opened into that strange space between worlds again.
So she had a way back home.
To either side of her rectangle were identical glassy rectangles faceted slightly away from it.
They were the exterior of an enormous kiosk, or perhaps a very low building, at the center of a large, featureless square. She walked all the way around it, rapping each rectangle with her key.
Only the one would open for her.
The first thing to do was to find out where–or, rather, when–she was. Ellie stepped in front of one of the hunched, slow-walking men. "Excuse me, sir, could you answer a few questions for me?"
The man raised a face that was utterly bleak and without hope. A ring of grey metal glinted from his neck. "Hawrzat dagtiknut?" he asked.
Ellie stepped back in horror, and, like a wind-up toy temporarily halted by a hand or a foot, the man resumed his plodding gait.
She cursed herself. Of course language would have changed in the however-many-centuries future she found herself in. Well ... that was going to make gathering information more difficult. But she was used to difficult tasks. The evening of James’s suicide, she had been the one to clean the walls and the floor. After that, she’d known that she was capable of doing anything she set her mind to.
Above all, it was important that she not get lost. She scanned the square with the doorways in time at its center–mentally, she dubbed it Times Square–and chose at random one of the broad avenues converging on it. That, she decided would be Broadway.
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