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.