by Mike Ashley
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, swivelled 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 shrieked, 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 John’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.
Ellie started down Broadway, watching everybody and everything. Some of the drone-folk were dragging sledges with complex machinery on them. Others were hunched under soft, translucent bags filled with murky fluid and vague biomorphic shapes. The air smelled bad, but in ways she was not familiar with.
She had gotten perhaps three blocks when the sirens went off – great piercing blasts of noise that assailed the ears and echoed from the building walls. All the streetlights flashed off and on and off again in a one-two rhythm. From unseen loudspeakers, an authoritative voice blared, “Akgang! Akgang! Kronzvarbrakar! Zawzawkstrag! Akgang! Akgang . . .”
Without hurry, the people in the street began turning away, touching their hands to dull grey plates beside nondescript doors and disappearing into the buildings.
“Oh, cripes!” Ellie muttered. She’d best—
There was a disturbance behind her. Ellie turned and saw the strangest thing yet.
It was a girl of eighteen or nineteen, wearing summer clothes – a man’s trousers, a short-sleeved flower-print blouse – and she was running down the street in a panic. She grabbed at the uncaring drones, begging for help. “Please!” she cried. “Can’t you help me? Somebody! Please . . . you have to help me!” Puffs of steam cam
e from her mouth with each breath. Once or twice she made a sudden dart for one of the doorways and slapped her hand on the greasy plates. But the doors would not open for her.
Now the girl had reached Ellie. In a voice that expected nothing, she said, “Please?”
“I’ll help you, dear,” Ellie said.
The girl shrieked, then convulsively hugged her. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you,” she babbled.
“Follow close behind me.” Ellie strode up behind one of the lifeless un-men and, just after he had slapped his hand on the plate, but before he could enter, grabbed his rough tunic and gave it a yank. He turned.
“Vamoose!” she said in her sternest voice, and jerked a thumb over her shoulder.
The un-man turned away. He might not understand the word, but the tone and the gesture sufficed.
Ellie stepped inside, pulling the girl after her. The door closed behind them.
“Wow,” said the girl wonderingly. “How did you do that?”
“This is a slave culture. For a slave to survive, he’s got to obey anyone who acts like a master. It’s that simple. Now, what’s your name and how did you get here?” As she spoke, Ellie took in her surroundings. The room they were in was dim, grimy – and vast. So far as she could see, there were no interior walls, only the occasional pillar and here and there a set of functional metal stairs without railings.
“Nadine Shepard. I . . . I . . . There was a door! And I walked through it and I found myself here! I . . .”
The child was close to hysteria. “I know, dear. Tell me, when are you from?”
“Chicago. On the North Side, near—”
“Not where, dear, when? What year is it?”
“Uh . . . 2004. Isn’t it?”
“Not here. Not now.” The grey people were everywhere, moving sluggishly, yet always keeping within sets of yellow lines painted on the concrete floor. Their smell was pervasive, and far from pleasant. Still . . .
Ellie stepped directly into the path of one of the sad creatures, a woman. When she stopped, Ellie took the tunic from her shoulders and then stepped back. Without so much as an expression of annoyance, the woman resumed her plodding walk.
