Hidalgo Rodriguez woke from a troubled sleep. His nightmares had been stranger and more unsettling than even a full gourd of wheero could account for. But opening his eyes was less than no help. He shrieked, and sprang to his feet even faster than he had on that distant childhood day in his father's goat shed when he had learned empirically that a human sneeze means "Run for your life!" in Goat.
The shriek woke Amparo and the children; within seconds they were harmonizing with him.
Their homey familiar hovel was gone. It had been replaced, by something indescribable, almost literally unseeable. It was everywhere, on all sides, had no apparent openings, and no features that any of them could identify. The light by which they saw it had no detectable source. Their first and best guess was that it was some kind of magical trap.
This diagnosis caused Hidalgo to utter a bellow of what he hoped sounded like rage, and throw himself bodily at the nearest part of the thing he could reach. He did not really expect to break through, but he had to try. He struck hard with a hunched shoulder, rebounded and gasped. He had not produced an opening or even a dent—but part of the omnipresent . . . stuff . . . had suddenly became transparent.
A window . . .
Outside it Hidalgo saw the familiar landscape of his home region, with some odd alterations he was too busy to study. He grabbed up a rag, wrapped his fist in it, and smashed at the window. It emphatically refused to break. His hand was more equivocal; he swore foully.
His son Julio followed Hidalgo's example, racing full tilt into the nearest wall to him. When nothing happened, he picked another spot and tried again. This time he was spectacularly successful: a door appeared in the stuff. He tested it; it worked just fine . . . and the entire Rodriguez clan joined him at high speed.
They stood outside the thing for a minute or so, all talking at the top of their lungs, none of them hearing a word—or noticing the sounds of similar loud "conversations" in the near distance.
The thing was still unidentifiable. It certainly did not look like a house, or even a building—not any that they had ever seen. It did not seem to have any straight lines or perpendiculars or right angles to it; there was no chimney.
Curiosity—and the growing realization that it was much hotter out here than it had been inside—finally caused them to reenter it.
They tried poking it some more. Finally Luz let out a scream. She had found a spot which caused it to grow a basin. Shouting at her to get away from it, Hidalgo cautiously approached the thing. For some reason, it had an extra faucet. He tried the one nearest him; its mechanism was unfamiliar to him, but not hard to figure out. Water came out, and swirled away.
Hidalgo gaped. His family had never, as far back as history recorded—yes, even unto his grandfather's day!—had access to running water in the home. He was rich! And there were two of the things. He tried the other one—and when he had grasped what it produced, he fainted dead away.
Hot water . . .
When he awoke, his new house was talking to him, telling him cheerfully of traffic conditions in a city he had only heard of. It showed him pictures. . . .
Hidalgo was a little comforted when he learned, shortly, that all of his neighbors in the hillside shanty-community were undergoing essentially identical experiences. So, elsewhere around the planet, were the family of Nkwame Van der Hoof, and their neighbors . . . the family of Algie Bent and their neighbors . . . the family of Trojan (his parents had named him after their hero) Khamela and their neighbors . . . the family of Lo Duc Tho and their neighbors . . . the list went on. Indeed, it was never completed.
A plague of houses seemed to be loose on the world. . . .
It took much longer for it to become apparent—and longer for it to be believed by anyone with an education—that people who lived in those toadstool houses could not get sick.