021118

Not at home

Some people swore that the house was haunted. People would say that about the oldest house on Mars. It was there when Snow landed in 2028. Gray weathered pine, joists and rafters spaced haphazardly, not level anywhere, it was the farmhouse that the farmer and his field hands had built on their own a century ago. There was one in my town, was there one in yours? The house number was 1313, darkened brass numbers screwed straight into the wood above the front door. The place was completely ordinary in its eccentricity.

Snow and Jenkins were first inside. He was the commander and she was the best shot. It was a big house by modern standards, its 2100 ft.² divided up into 8 rooms, and not a stick of furniture in any of them. Pull-down ladder to the attic (nothing up there), crawlspace floored with red sand just like all the other red sand.

Carman and Uriyev got pretty antsy during the 20 minutes or so before the other two came back out. It shouldn't have taken that long, but I guess they took it slow and easy. By the way: antsy. I love that word.

The mission planners had them continue the planetary survey, but kept them away from the house. After they returned home they were sequestered for months. Rumors flew. Snow was dying of some aggressive new cancer. Carman had gone crazy and killed the other three. Jenkins was pregnant. No word about the house leaked. Eventually, the astronauts were let out. Obviously, Carman had not killed the other three. Snow didn't look sick. Jenkins was fit.

But time went by and no colony ship was launched. Somebody told the tabloids -- Carman needed money. But the house. It showed up on Earth. Anyone could walk right in the door, wherever the house appeared. In the middle of a parking lot, on a crowded baseball diamond, in one of those oversold subdivisions from 2008 where the houses had never been built. It could show up in your parents' front yard, or right in the heart of the city, squeezed between two buildings that, you could have sworn, were not 10 feet apart the day before. But you went in that house and it was always full of people. Websites were devoted to following the thing. One, a global real-time map, showed that the house was appearing simultaneously in dozens of places. Then hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. People, even children, flooded into the house wherever it was, mad to be a part of the phenomenon. You could run in the front door in Tucson and climb out the back window in Kuala Lumpur. Some people tried to destroy it, some practically worshiped it; thrill seekers packed light and took their chances. Then, all of a sudden, there was only one house again, the original, back on Mars (as it turned out). The house was empty again, but if you dared to go in and listen, you heard voices. The longer you stayed the more you heard. All those people who'd been in the houses when they collapsed back to one and returned to Mars, it sounded like they were still inside. You might listen for somebody in particular, your kid sister perhaps, and eventually you would hear her, screaming or crying. At least 200,000 people were missing.