It was a weekend morning when I just finished my breakfast and was waiting for my friends to come over to my place to spend some time together. Soon they arrived and started gossiping about many matters. But it didn't take much time for us to become bored. So, we decided to watch an interesting program on television. When we turned on the television, we saw the news telecast for some time. But being bored when we were about to change the channel we learned that NASA and SpaceX were planning to go to Mars. As we were very interested in astronomy, we made a plan to secretly go to Mars. But I think it was silly for us to even think of going to Mars as we had not a sufficient rocket or enough money to buy fuel. But it is unknown to me why but we still kept planning about going there. About an hour later, we started talking about other matters again.
Then Bishal said, "Hey, Himadri why have you bought this particular house? This is far away from the city. You could have bought one near the city."
I replied to him that I thought of that, too. But I didn't know and still don't what was so interesting about this house. But I ensured him that I was more interested in the quietness of the forest near the house. Though there were no neighbors nearby, it still had something that had mysteriously attracted me to buy this house and it is not the unbelievable cheap price of it.
Then my friend Aditya asked me to show them the interior of my new house and the nearby forest.
Everyone agreed that it was a good idea and it made me showing them my house from interior design to exterior environment.
After half an hour, we almost finished our tour. Then they were very curious to see the forest area. As they insisted I had to accompany them there. After roaming for some time, we almost freaked out discovering a mysterious thing.
Kanak told, "I think the mysterious attraction is this weirdly shaped house."
Others also inquired me about this house which I didn't even know about.
I had a tough time making them believe that I was unaware of that. And even a single person did not live nearby.
But finally, when I succeeded, they wanted to go inside the house. I tried to stop them as even I was unaware of it though I bought the place about a month ago. But they didn't listen and I also had to follow them. But the door to the world of mystery just had opened.
We were astonished at and more accurately surprised to see the interior of the house. It was less like a house from inside and more like a launch site and what almost gave me a heart attack was the ready-made rocket including other building materials of a space shuttle and many barrels full of kerosene and a good number of solar panels.
I don't know why but after seeing this, instead of running away from the place, we started planning about going to Mars.
After coming back to my house, my friends decided to move into my place so that we can build a space shuttle and land on Mars as the first people to land on an isolated planet like Mars.
Sudipta asked, "How many days do we need to make a complete journey to Mars and back?"
Arithra replied, "I think that should be counted in months. With that amount of fuel, I think it may take at least five months and for the changing astronomical distance between Earth and Mars it may take even higher to come back."
Sparsha said that it was a lot of time and also inquired what he meant by astronomical distance.
Aditya replied, "Earth and Mars both travel around the sun at different speeds. So, the distance between them keeps changing."
After further discussion on the matter, we planned about living together in my house for a few months. In the afternoon, they bade goodbye. But I still had a strange feeling.