Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization

ONE

The controls jerked in his hands as if they were alive.

Outside the cockpit, white mist streaked by. He could see the nose of his craft, but nothing beyond it.

“Computer says you’re too tight.” The radio crackled in his ear, the static of shredding ions from the air threatening to overwhelm the signal.

“I got this,” he protested, despite the fact that his instruments were telling him impossible things.

“Crossing the straights,” control said. “Shutting it down. Shutting it all down.”

“No!” he said. “We need to power up—”

He was spinning like crazy now, black and red, black and red, and suddenly the controls ripped free of his hands, and he screamed…

Cooper sat up in the bed, drenched in sweat, and in his mind—still saturated in dream—he was still spinning, still blind in the mist. Panting, he felt the air rushing into and out of his lungs as he tried to control it, to take control of something…

“Dad? Dad!”

He turned at the familiar voice, and saw her, in the faint first light of dawn coming through his window. His daughter. The whirlwind of his nightmare faded, and there was only the familiar room, the scent of old wood and mothballs coming from his bedclothes.

“Sorry,” he murmured. “Go back to sleep.”

She just stood there, though. Murph, as stubborn as ever.

“I thought you were a ghost,” she said.

Cooper saw she was serious.

“There’s no ghost, Murph,” he mumbled.

“Grandpa says you can get ghosts,” she persisted.

“Grandpa’s a little too close to being one himself,” Cooper grunted. “Back to sleep.”

Murph still wasn’t ready to go. The early morning light picked up the red in her hair, and her green eyes were full of concern. And obstinacy.

“Were you dreaming about the crash?” she asked.

“Back to sleep, Murph,” he said, trying to be firm. Murph hesitated, then finally, reluctantly turned and shuffled back through the door.

Rubbing his eyes, Cooper turned to the window. Outside lay a vista of young corn, its leaves dark green, still only waist high. Dawn was painting the tops of the stalks a vivid red-gold. A gentle breeze sent ripples through it, and in his sleep-blurred vision he felt as if he were gazing upon a vast sea, stretching off to the horizon.

TWO

“Corn, sure,” the old lady says. “But dust. In your ears, your mouth.” We move from her to an old man’s face, his watery eyes searching through decades and distance for the road marks left behind him.

“Dust just everywhere,” he says, nodding. “Everywhere.”

Donald swept the dust from the farmhouse porch, knowing in the back of his mind that it was pointless, that in a matter of hours it would be covered again. Yet simply surrendering to it seemed even more pointless.

This porch—and the sturdy two-story farmhouse to which it was attached—had sheltered generations. It deserved care. Wind and dust had nearly gnawed through the last coat of white paint, and it wasn’t likely to get a new coat anytime soon. And it needed bigger repairs than that, work that he was too old to do and Cooper was too busy to see to.

But he could sweep the porch. That much his aging body was still capable of doing. He could beat back the dust, although each assault was a temporary victory at best.

He straightened up and surveyed his work, then loosened the kerchief that stood between the grime and his lungs as he turned and swung open the farmhouse door.

So much for the porch, he thought. It was time to fix breakfast. He made his way to the kitchen, running his fingers through what little bit of thin hair remained on his balding head, feeling the grit matted in it.

Inside, he went to the table, where bowls lay upside down, covered in a thin film of dust, and turned their clean insides up. Then he turned his attention to the stove.

For Donald, the kitchen was probably the most comforting room in the house. His wife had once stood in front of the sturdy enameled ivory oven and stovetop, and in time his daughter had joined her, at first straining on her tiptoes to stir the pot. Then later, as a strong young woman with both feet firmly planted, feeding a family of her own. Both women now gone, but both still here, somehow.

He put the grits on and stirred them as they came to a boil, then turned down the heat so they would simmer, remembering times when breakfast had been a bit more… varied. Oatmeal, waffles, pancakes. Fruit.

Now, mostly grits. And without a lot of the things that made grits worthwhile—the butter, sorghum molasses, bacon for Chrissake. But there wasn’t much point in bawling about the things that were gone, was there? And there was plenty good that remained. Time was, a bowl of plain grits was more than most people could hope for in a day. Those days were past, too, and he didn’t miss them in the slightest.

Count your blessings, old man. He could almost hear the old woman saying it. No sense moaning ’bout what you can’t have. And by the time the grits were done, counting the better end of his blessings was easy enough—they were all right there in front of him.

There was his grandson Tom, of course. Donald’s grandson was always there when food hit the table. His fifteen-year-old body seemed to travel on two hollow legs. The boy was always hungry—and so he should be, because he was a hard worker, too. He didn’t complain about the lack of diversity in breakfast.

Grits were fine with Tom.

His ten-year-old granddaughter Murph was a bit slower to arrive. Her coppery hair was wet, and she still had a towel around her neck from the shower. At times he thought her the spitting image of her mother, but then she would turn in such a way, or say a particular thing, and he could see her father there. Like now. She was fiddling with the pieces of something or other as she sat down. Which she oughtn’t to be.

“Not at the table, Murph,” he admonished, without any heat in his voice.

But Murph more or less ignored him and looked instead to her father, who had been there all along—before either of his kids—getting his coffee. Cooper was Donald’s son-in-law.

He was a good man. He was a decent farmer, too, very much the guy you wanted when you needed a twenty-year-old combine put back in working condition with a handful of wires and an old toaster. Or wanted your solar array to pull in another fifteen percent. He was a whiz with machines. And his daughter had loved him. If he couldn’t have his daughter, Cooper was the next best thing, he figured. The man she loved, the children she made.

“Dad, can you fix this?” Murph asked Cooper.

Cooper came over to the table and reached for the pieces of plastic she had pinched between her fingertips, a frown presenting on his lean face. Donald saw now what it was—the broken model of an Apollo lunar lander.

“What’d you do to my lander?” Cooper asked.

“Wasn’t me,” Murph said.

“Lemme guess,” Tom sneered, through a mouthful of grits. “Your ghost?”

Murph appeared not to hear Tom. She had lately seemed to discover that ignoring him irritated him far more than any rejoinder she might come up with.

“It knocked it off my shelf,” she said to her father, quite matter-of-factly. “It keeps knocking books off.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts, dumb-ass,” Tom said.

“Hey!” Cooper said, sending him a hard look. Tom just shrugged and looked unrepentant.

But Murph wouldn’t let go.

“I looked it up,” she said. “It’s called a poltergeist.”

“Dad, tell her,” Tom pleaded.

“Murph,” Cooper said, “you know that’s not scientific.” But his daughter stared at him stubbornly.

“You say science is about admitting what we don’t know,” she said.

“She’s got you there,” Donald said.

Cooper handed Murph back the pieces.

“Start looking after our stuff,” he said.

Donald caught Cooper’s eye.

“Coop,” he admonished.

Cooper shrugged. Donald was right. Murph was smart, but she needed a little guidance.

“Fine,” he said. “Murph, you wanna talk science, don’t just tell me you’re scared of some ghost. Record the facts, analyze—present your conclusions.”

“Sure,” Murph said, and her expression said that the wheels were turning already.

Cooper seemed to think that settled things. He grabbed his keys and stood up.

“Hold up,” Donald said. “Parent–teacher conferences. Parent… not grandparent.”

Donald meant well, but Cooper was still feeling the sting of his comment as the kids climbed into the battered old pickup truck, knocking the night’s layer of dust off of the seats. The old pickup showed almost as much rust as it did the original blue paint job, and enough dents and scratches to prove what a workhorse it had been.

Sure, he’d missed a few of these school things, now and then—he was busy. He was a single father. Was it so bad to ask Donald to pick up a little of the slack? It wasn’t like Cooper didn’t spend time with the kids. Quality time.

But that didn’t mean jumping through whatever hoops the school demanded of him. He had better things to do.

As he opened the driver’s-side door, he took another sip of his coffee, peering at the black cloud rising in the distance, trying to gauge it, estimate how far away it was. Whose fields were there? Which way was it moving?

“Dust storm?” he wondered aloud.

Donald shook his head.

“Nelson’s torching his whole crop.”

“Blight?” Cooper asked.

“They’re saying it’s the last harvest for okra,” Donald replied. “Ever.”

Cooper watched the black smoke, wondering if that could be right, knowing in the pit of his gut it probably was. But what good was okra, anyway? Slimy stuff, unless you fried it. Used to thicken soup. A luxury, not a staple. It was an insignificant loss.

“Shoulda planted corn like the rest of us,” he said as he got into the truck. Nelson had always had more nerve than sense.

“Be nice to Miss Hanley,” Donald said. “She’s single.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Cooper snapped, knowing full well what the old man was getting at.

“Repopulating the Earth,” Donald clarified. “Start pulling your weight.”

He seemed to get nosier every day. Cooper wasn’t sure where the line was, but he thought the old man had crossed it a while back, and was now just sort of camping out smack in the middle of his private concerns.

“Start minding your business,” Cooper shot back. But he knew the old man meant well.

Moments later they were wheeling down the dirt road. Cooper gripped the steering wheel with one hand and his coffee with the other. Murph was sandwiched between him and Tom.

“Okay,” he said to her as first gear began to wind out. He stepped on the clutch. “Gimme second.”

Murph wrestled the long shifter into second gear as Cooper took another sip of coffee and let the pedal up.

“Now third,” he said after a few seconds, as the truck picked up speed. He pushed down again, and Murph struggled with the stick. He heard the transmission grind in protest as she failed to locate third.

“Find a gear, dumb-ass,” Tom rebuked.

“Shut up, Tom!” Cooper scolded his son.

His reprimand was punctuated by a loud bang, followed by an abrupt roughening of the ride.

“What’d you do, Murph?” Tom demanded.

“She didn’t do anything,” Cooper said. “We lost a tire, is all.” He pulled over—not that anyone was likely to come along.

“Murphy’s Law,” Tom said, a little too gleefully. He made a little “ouch!” face at her.

“Shut up, Tom,” Murph said, and she shot him a withering look.

Cooper pushed open the door, climbed out, looked at the tire, and saw that yeah, it was pretty damn flat. He turned to Tom.

“Grab the spare,” he said.

“That is the spare,” Tom replied, opening his door and joining his father.

“Okay,” Cooper said. “Patch kit.”

“How am I supposed to patch it out here?” Tom protested.

“Figure it out,” he told his son. “I’m not always going to be here to help you.” Then he went around the back and to the other side of the truck. He found Murph leaning there, still fuming a little.

“Why’d you and Mom name me after something bad?” she demanded.

“We didn’t,” he told her.

“Murphy’s Law?” she asked, equal parts dubious and indignant.

Cooper studied his daughter’s earnest expression. He remembered the young man and woman who had named her.

“Murphy’s Law doesn’t mean bad stuff will happen,” he explained gently, really wanting her to understand. “It means ‘whatever can happen… will happen.’ And that sounded just fine to us.”

Murph frowned, and at first he thought she was about to protest further, but then he realized she wasn’t really paying attention to him anymore. Her eyes were far away, as if she had suddenly tuned into a frequency he couldn’t receive.

“What?” he asked. But then he heard it too, a long, low rumble, rising in pitch due to the Doppler effect. Something was coming toward them—no, flying toward them—and he was sure he recognized the noise it was making. But it had been so long, it was a little hard to believe his ears.

He grabbed Murph and pushed her back toward her seat in the truck, just as a projectile blew past overhead—a missile-shaped object with long, narrow, tapered wings jutting out at right angles.

“Come on!” he shouted. He leapt into the truck, fumbling for the laptop computer and the antenna that was connected to it. He quickly passed them to Murph, then yelled at Tom, who had the jack in his hand and was looking up from the flat tire.

“Get in!”

“What about the tire?” the boy asked.

But there was no time to worry about that now.

THREE

The drone could not, of course, be bothered to follow roads, so neither could they. As fast as the truck would go, they were tearing through a cornfield, flattening the stalks beneath three tires and a wobbling rim.

He tried not to think about how much of the crop he was destroying, but at least it was his own field. He wouldn’t have an angry lynch mob showing up at the house in a few hours. And he knew it was justified. The corn was precious, yes, but you didn’t see one of these things every day.

Or month.

Or… year.

Cooper darted his gaze about frantically, trying to see through the corn, over it, but between the high stalks and the roof of the truck there was only a narrow window of visibility.

Across the cab, scrunched against the passenger-side door, Murph had the laptop booted up. Tom was in the middle this time, and Coop was doing his own shifting.

“There!” Tom shouted, pointing off to the right. Cooper ducked his head and looked up.

And there it was, only meters above the corn.

What the hell is it doing? he thought. What’s it searching for? Cooper spun the wheel, fishtailing them toward the thing that looked like a small plane without a cockpit.

Then he recognized the silhouette.

“Indian air force surveillance drone,” Cooper said. “Solar cells could power an entire farm.”

He glanced at Tom.

“Take the wheel,” he said.

After a quick display of mutual contortion, Tom was in the driver’s seat and Cooper was in the middle with the laptop. He handed Murph the antenna.

“Keep it pointed right at it,” he told her. Then he went to work on the computer. After a moment the screen began to fill with the flowing, almost liquid lines of the Devanagari script. But success gave way to disappointment—the signal was dropping away.

“Faster, Tom,” he said. “I’m losing it.”

Tom took the command to heart, flooring the pedal of the old truck and zigzagging through the corn with abandon. The signal jumped back up, and Cooper kept working at the encryption. The truck burst from the corn and onto open ground.

“Dad?” Tom said.

“Almost got it,” he told his son, eyes locked on the screen. “Don’t stop.”

The drone vanished from view, dropping over the horizon. They must be close to the next valley, Cooper figured, for it to be able to pull that trick.

“Dad…” Tom said, his voice sounding a little more urgent.

Cooper looked up, just in time to see they were barreling toward the sharp drop into the reservoir. His eyes went wide, and his heart dropped into his shoes.

“Tom!” he yelped.

The boy slammed on the brakes. Rocks pinged off the bottom of the truck, and they skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust, dangerously near the drop. Breathing heavily, Cooper stared for a moment, thinking how it was good they hadn’t had four working tires, because they would have been going even faster…

He looked over at Tom.

His son just shrugged.

“You told me to keep going,” he said.

Heart still racing, Cooper reached past his daughter and pushed open the passenger door. Murph hopped out the truck and he followed, laptop in hand.

“Guess that answers the ‘if I told you to drive off a cliff’ scenario,” he muttered, mostly to himself. Then he looked at Murph to make sure she was okay. She still had the antenna pointed hopefully beyond the bluff.

“We lost it,” she said.

Her disappointment made the grin Cooper felt tugging at his lips feel all the better.

“No, we didn’t,” he said, as the drone came soaring back over them. He continued piloting it with the track pad, banking it in a broad arc above. Both kids watched the machine, a marvel from another era, as it dipped and straightened its wings at his command. Tom looked mildly excited. Murph was clearly in awe.

“Want to give it a whirl?” he asked Murph.

He didn’t have to ask twice. As he guided her fingers across the pad, her face lit up with amazement and joy. It was wonderful to see, and he wanted to stretch the moment out forever.

But they had things to do.

“Let’s set her down next to the reservoir,” he said, after a bit.

Spotting a wide, flat spot, Cooper brought the drone to the ground. Then they drove, slowly and unsteadily, across the rough ground, rocks and gravel scraping against the wheel that sported only tattered fragments of the ruined tire.

The drone was almost as long as the truck, but slim and tubular.

What a beauty, he thought, rubbing his palm across the smooth, dark surface, imagining the clever hands that had built it, feeling almost like a kid again himself. Not that long ago, mankind had made such marvelous, beautiful things.

“How long you think it’s been up there?” Tom asked.

“Delhi mission control went down same as ours, ten years ago,” Cooper answered.

“It’s been up there ten years?” Tom said, his tone incredulous. “Why’d it come down so low?”

“Sun finally cooked its brain,” Cooper speculated. “Or it came down looking for something.”

“What?” Murph wanted to know.

“Some kind of signal,” he replied. He shook his head. “Who knows?”

Cooper explored the surface of the machine until he found the access panel. Other than his own efforts—and the faint, sluggish movement of the river—all was still. A slight breeze mingled the scent of burnt corn with aquatic decay. Like everything else, the reservoir had known better days.

He pried open the panel and peered into the box that housed the drone’s brain.

“What are you going to do with it?” Murph asked.

“Give it something scientifically responsible to do,” Cooper said. “Like drive a combine.” He moved to one end and hefted it experimentally. He and Tom would be able to get it into the truck.

“Couldn’t we just let it go?” she asked. “It’s not hurting anyone.”

Cooper glanced down fondly at his daughter. She had a good heart, and generous sensibilities. And a part of him ached at the thought of taking this thing that had roamed freely on the winds for more than a decade—maybe the last of its kind, one of the last flying machines ever—and enslaving it to a field of corn. But unlike Murph, he knew that such feelings had to come second to the necessity.

“This thing has to adapt,” he explained. “Just like the rest of us.”

By the time they finally limped up to the school, the sleek drone hanging out of the back of the battered truck, Cooper was fighting down a certain amount of anxiety about the parent–teacher conferences.

“How’s this work?” he asked tentatively. “You guys come with?”

“I’ve got class,” Tom informed him with a hint of superiority. Then he patted Murph on the shoulder. “But she needs to wait.”

Murph sent Tom another venom-filled glare as he nimbly exited the vehicle.

“Why?” Cooper asked. “What?” As his son disappeared toward the door, he turned to his daughter.

Murph looked uncomfortable as she scribbled something in her notebook.

“Dad,” she began, “I had a… thing. Well, they’ll tell you about it. Just try and…”

“Am I gonna be mad?” Cooper demanded, raising his eyebrows.

“Not with me,” Murph said. “Just try not to…”

“Relax,” he reassured her. “I got this.”

FOUR

Cooper hadn’t cared for the principal’s office when he was a boy. Now he found he cared for it even less. He felt nervous and jittery—almost as if he had done something wrong.

The principal—William Okafor—was looking out of his window as Cooper stepped in, and he turned to greet his visitor. He was a bit younger than Cooper himself. The authority that was so casually attached to him seemed outsized for the job of riding herd on less than a hundred students. His dark suit and black tie only enhanced the impression, and made Cooper more nervous.

What would he have been thirty years ago? A corporate executive? A military officer? The president of a university?

There was a woman in the room, as well, and he nodded to her. She nodded back. He wondered if she was Miss Hanley, and remembered Donald’s advice to be nice to her. He had to admit that she wasn’t too hard on the eyes. Long blonde hair braided and tied around the top of her head. Conservative skirt and light blue sweater.

“Little late, Coop,” Okafor chastised. He pointed at the empty chair in front of his desk and then nodded out the window toward Cooper’s truck.

“Ah… we had a flat,” Cooper said.

“And I guess you had to stop off at the Asian fighter-plane store.” He sounded a combination of disapproving and curious.

Cooper sat, trying to smile.

“Actually, sir, it’s a surveillance drone,” he explained. “With outstanding solar cells.”

The principal didn’t seem impressed, and he picked up a piece of paper, scanning it.

“We got Tom’s scores back,” he said. “He’s going to make an excellent farmer.” He pushed a paper across his desk. “Congratulations.”

Cooper glanced at it.

“Yeah, he’s got the knack for it,” he conceded.

But Tom could do better.

“What about college?” he asked.

“The university only takes a handful,” Okafor replied. “They don’t have the resources—”

That was too much for Cooper.

“I’m still paying taxes,” he erupted indignantly. “Where’s that go? There’s no more armies…”

The principal shook his head slowly.

“Not to the university, Coop,” he said. “You have to be realistic.”

Realistic? Cooper only felt his outrage growing. This was his kid. This was Tom.

“You’re ruling him out now?” Cooper persisted, not willing to let go. “He’s fifteen.”

“Tom’s score simply isn’t high enough,” Okafor replied.

Trying to keep it together, Cooper pointed at the principal’s pants.

“What’re you?” he demanded. “About a 36-inch waist?”

Okafor just stared at him, clearly unsure where he was going with this.

“Thirty-inch inseam?” Cooper added.

Okafor continued to look at him without comprehension.

“I’m not sure I see what—” he began with a little frown.

“You’re telling me,” Cooper plowed on, “you need two numbers to measure your own ass, but just one to measure my son’s future?”

Miss Hanley stifled a laugh. So she had a sense of humor, too. That was okay. But she looked rebuffed when the principal shot her a nasty look before putting his game face back on.

“You’re a well-educated man, Coop,” he said, trying to regain the upper hand. “A trained pilot—”

“And an engineer,” Cooper put in, not willing to be shortchanged by this condescending pri… principal.

“Okay,” Okafor said, leaning forward. “Well, right now the world doesn’t need more engineers. We didn’t run out of planes, or television sets. We ran out of food.”

Cooper sat back in the chair, feeling the steam leak out of him.

“The world needs farmers,” Okafor continued, with a smile that was probably meant to be benign but just felt patronizing. “Good farmers, like you. And Tom. We’re a caretaker generation. And things are getting better. Maybe your grandchildren—”

Cooper suddenly just wanted to be very far from this man, this conversation, this situation—all of it.

“Are we done, sir?” he asked abruptly.

But it wasn’t going to be that easy. Nothing ever was.

“No,” the principal said. “Miss Hanley is here to talk about Murph.”

Reluctantly, Cooper shifted his gaze to Miss Hanley. What was coming next? Were they going to tell him that Murph wasn’t sixth-grade material? Because if that was the case, there were some modifications he could make to his combines.

They could make a real mess of this place.

“Murph’s a bright kid,” she began, dispelling that worry, but raining a metric ton of others. “A wonderful kid, Mr. Cooper. But she’s been having a little trouble…”

Here we go, Cooper thought. The “but.”

Miss Hanley placed a textbook on the desk.

“She brought this to school,” she said. “To show the other kids the section on lunar landings…”

“Yeah,” he said, recognizing it. “It’s one of my old textbooks. She likes the pictures.”

“This is an old federal textbook,” Miss Hanley said. “We’ve replaced them with corrected versions.”

“Corrected?” Cooper asked.

“Explaining how the Apollo missions were faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union.”

He was so stunned that for a moment he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to react.

Laugh? Cry?

Explode?

He settled for incredulity.

“You don’t believe we went to the moon?” Sure, he was aware that there had always been a fringe element—crazies who held to that cock-eyed nonsense. But a teacher? How could anyone with half a mind peddle that baloney?

She smiled at him as if he were a three-year-old.

“I believe it was a brilliant piece of propaganda,” she allowed. “The Soviets bankrupted themselves pouring resources into rockets and other useless machines.”

“Useless machines?” Cooper asked, feeling his fuse grow shorter.

Of course, she kept going.

“Yes, Mr. Cooper,” she said, tolerantly. “And if we don’t want to repeat the wastefulness of the twentieth century, our children need to learn about this planet. Not tales of leaving it.”

Cooper tried to absorb that for a moment. His fuse was still burning, flaring even, sputtering toward the keg.

“One of those useless machines they used to make,” he finally began, “was called an MRI. And if we had any of them left, the doctors would have been able to find the cyst in my wife’s brain before she died, rather than afterwards. Then she would be sitting here listening to this, which’d be good, ’cos she was always the calmer one…”

Miss Hanley looked first confused, then embarrassed, then a little aghast, but before she could say anything, Okafor broke in.

“I’m sorry about your wife, Mr. Cooper,” he said. “But Murph got into a fistfight with several of her classmates over this Apollo nonsense, and we thought it best to bring you in and see what ideas you might have for dealing with her behavior on the home front.” With that, he stopped and waited.

Cooper regarded the two of them for a moment, thinking how unreal it was, how everything seemed sort of normal sometimes, and then you realized how upside down things had actually turned.

Am I that out of touch? he wondered. Has it really gotten that bad?

He guessed he was, and that it had. He didn’t pay much attention to what little news there was, because he had long ago realized it was really mostly propaganda. But he hadn’t realized they had gone so far as to rewrite the freaking textbooks.

Principal Okafor and Miss Hanley were waiting expectantly. They wanted to know how he was going to punish Murph for her temerity. How he was going to straighten her out.

They deserved an answer.

“Sure,” he said, finally, carefully measuring out his words. “Well, there’s a ball game tomorrow night, and Murph’s going through a bit of a baseball phase. There’ll be candy and soda…”

A look of approval had begun to appear on Miss Hanley’s face. He remembered Donald’s words again. But even if he were anywhere near to being in the market for another wife, no amount of looks could make up for this amount of stupid. He regarded her bluntly.

“I think I’ll take her to that,” he told her.

She blinked as if she didn’t understand, then turned to Okafor, a very unhappy expression starting upon her pretty features.

The principal didn’t look so happy himself.

“How’d it go?” Murph asked a few minutes later, as he approached the pickup.

“I, uh… got you suspended,” he admitted.

“What?” she gasped.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“Dad!” she said, her voice rising. “I told you not to—”

The CB radio in the truck suddenly squawked to life.

“Cooper?” it crackled. “Boots for Cooper.”

With a certain amount of relief, he brushed past his distressed daughter and picked up the handset, holding it close alongside his mouth.

“Cooper,” he replied.

“Coop, those combines you rebuilt went haywire,” Boots asserted. He sounded a little excited, which was unusual. Boots had been Cooper’s chief farmhand for half a decade, but he’d been farming since childhood, and had pretty much seen it all.

“Power the controllers down for a few minutes,” Cooper said, still aware of Murph’s expression of disbelief, and trying to avoid catching her eye.

“Did that,” Boots replied. “You should come take a look, it’s kinda weird.”

FIVE

Kinda weird? Cooper thought as they passed the enormous boxy harvester that was pulling up to the house. How about, “Freakin’ weird?”

The harvester wasn’t alone. Dozens of automated farming machines had arrived in his front yard and stopped, nudged up to his porch as if they were waiting to be let in. It reminded Cooper of a nativity scene, with the machines playing the parts of the animals.

As he and Murph got out of the truck to more fully appreciate the bizarre tableau, Boots arrived. His white hair marked him as a bit older than Cooper. He was no great thinker, but he knew farming as well as anyone.

“One by one they been peeling off from the fields and heading over,” Boots said.

Cooper walked over to the harvester, opened up the cabin, and had a look at the autopilot that worked the controls.

“Something’s interfering with their compass,” Boots went on. “Magnetism or some such…”

That much was obvious, Cooper thought. But what was there in the house that could exert that sort of magnetic force? He thought about the drone, which also had been called by something unknown—if not to his house, then at least to the same general area. What were the odds of both things happening in the same day?

They seemed pretty low.

He wheeled and strode toward the house, not at all sure what he was looking for. Whatever it was, though, he was damned determined that he was gonna find it.

He didn’t see anything in the kitchen, though. Murph walked in behind him.

“What is it, Dad?”

Before he could answer, there was a pronounced—if not particularly loud—thump from upstairs. Cooper moved quickly to the stairs, then climbed them warily, all sorts of thoughts scurrying through his mind.

Maybe someone else had been trying to hijack the drone, and now they were screwing with his machines, invading his house?

Maybe it was something else—another drone, crashed into the upstairs, calling desperately for its winged comrade in some command code that was affecting the farm equipment.

He was certain now, in his mind, that it couldn’t have been a coincidence—the drone, the way the harvesters were acting. There had to be a connection.

Damned if I can figure out what it can be, though… He hesitated slightly at the threshold to Murph’s bedroom. The door was open, and he could see inside.

One entire wall was a bookshelf, floor to ceiling. Most of the books they contained had once belonged to his wife, Erin, just as the room itself had been hers when she was a girl. Long before they had married.

Now it was Murph’s room.

He noticed there were now gaps in what had once been overstuffed bookshelves. The missing books were on the floor. Suddenly he remembered Murph’s comments, earlier in the day.

“Nothing special about which books,” Murph said, moving into the room from behind him. “Been working on it, like you said.” She held up the notebook in which she’d been drawing. The page was covered by a pattern that looked something like a barcode.

“I counted the spaces,” she said, as if that explained it all.

“Why?” Cooper asked.

“In case the ghost is trying to say something,” she explained. “I’m trying Morse.”

“Morse?” he said.

“Yeah, dots and dashes, used for—”

“Murph,” he said, trying to be gentle. “I know what Morse code is. I just don’t think your bookshelf’s trying to talk to you.”

She looked at him with a mixture of hurt and embarrassment. But she didn’t even try to reply.

Donald offered him a beer. Cooper took it, and gazed aimlessly off toward the dark fields, the old man sitting there beside him in a chair that was probably as old as he was.

“Had to reset every compass clock and GPS to offset for the anomaly,” Cooper said.

“Which is?” Donald asked.

Cooper took a swig of the beer. It was cold, and it felt good in his throat, but for him it would never quite taste right. Beer was supposed to be made of barley. Not corn. But barley was sleeping with the dinosaurs now, courtesy of the blight.

“No idea,” he said, finally admitting that for all of his apparently outdated training and knowledge, he didn’t have an explanation any more scientific than his daughter’s ghost. “If the house was built on magnetic ore, we’d’ve seen this the first time we switched on a tractor.”

Donald nodded and sipped his own drink. He didn’t press it any further. Instead he changed to an even less pleasant subject.

“Sounds like your meeting at school didn’t go so well.”

Cooper sighed, thinking back to the encounter, trying to pinpoint exactly what it was that had left him feeling so angry. Was it the lie about Apollo?

Partly. But that was just part of something bigger.

“We’ve forgotten who we are, Donald,” he said. “Explorers. Pioneers. Not caretakers.”

Donald nodded thoughtfully. Cooper waited, knowing Donald would take his time if he thought he had something important to say—weigh up his words like kilos of corn before broadcasting the least of them.

“When I was a kid,” he finally said, “it felt like they made something new every day. Some gadget or idea. Like every day was Christmas. But six billion people…” He shook his head. “Just try to imagine that. And every last one of them trying to have it all.” He shifted to face Cooper directly. “This world isn’t so bad. Tom’ll do just fine—you’re the one who doesn’t belong. Born forty years too late, and forty years too early. My daughter knew it, God bless her. And your kids know it.

“’Specially Murph,” he added.

Cooper turned his gaze skyward, where the stars were showing them something that didn’t happen that much anymore. A show worth staying up for. He could pick out the Seven Sisters and Orion’s belt and the dim, faintly red orb of Mars. Humanity had been headed there, once. He had been headed there, or at least that had been the general idea.

“We used to look up and wonder at our place in the stars,” he said. “Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

Donald’s expression was sympathetic.

“Cooper,” he said, “you were good at something, and you never got a chance to do anything with it. I’m sorry. But that’s not your kids’ fault.”

Cooper knew he didn’t have anything to say to that, so he didn’t even try. He just continued watching the slow wheel of the night sky, the thousands of stars he could see, the trillions he couldn’t due to atmosphere and distance. Men and women had been out there. Men had gone to the moon, and no rewriting of any textbook would ever change that reality.

No matter how inconvenient a fact it might be for the caretakers.

SIX

Something in the face of the old man shifts. His eyes are looking at something we cannot see. Should not see.

“May 14th,” he says. “Never forget. Clear as a bell. You’d never think…”

Another man’s face, also old, and his expression is close kin to that of the first.

“When the first of the real big ones rolled in,” he says, “I thought it was the end of the world.”

The crack of the bat brought Cooper’s wandering mind back to the game, at least for a moment.

He watched the ball shoot up, like a rocket determined to break through the stratosphere, only to slow, briefly stop, and arc sharply back down to the mitt waiting to catch it. He gazed around at the half-filled stands, where a smattering of applause didn’t seem to really add up to enthusiasm.

“In my day we had real ball players,” Donald complained. “Who’re these bums?”

The pop fly was the third out, and the team on the field started in—“New York Yankees” printed plainly on their uniforms.

“Well, in my day people were too busy fighting over food for baseball,” Cooper reminded him, “so consider this progress.”

Murph reached a bag of popcorn toward Donald.

“Fine,” the old man grumbled, looking at the bag as if it might contain manure. “But popcorn at a ball game is unnatural. I want a hot dog.”

Cooper watched his daughter’s face frame her confusion.

“What’s a hot dog?” she asked.

Cooper glanced at Tom, sitting next to him. They hadn’t spoken since his conversation with the principal, but it was probably time to address it. So after a moment, with some hesitation, he put his arm around the boy.

“The school says you’re gonna follow in my footsteps,” he told the boy. “I think that’s great.”

Tom offered him a skeptical look.

“You think that’s great?” he said.

“You hate farming, Dad,” Murph piped up. “Grandpa said.”

Not helping here… Cooper sent a frown back toward Donald, who just lifted his shoulders in a half-assed apology. Not helping at all.

Feeling a little of the wind go out of him, Cooper turned his attention back to Tom.

“What’s important is how you feel about it, Tom,” he said. The boy was silent for a moment, as he thought about it.

“I like what you do,” Tom said. He wasn’t joking, or trying to be ironic, but answering sincerely. “I like our farm.”

Cooper heard the bat crack again, but this time the crowd didn’t respond at all. In fact, the players on the field didn’t either—no one was running bases or trying to catch the ball. Instead, one by one, their gazes were turning upward.

Cooper looked up, as well.

“You’ve never seen the like,” the old man says, his voice thick with remembered fear. “Black. Just black.”

The storm was building itself on the horizon, a wall of dust churning toward them. Cooper always thought they looked more like tsunamis than storms, and this one more than most. The air was sharp with ozone, and already the wind was picking up as the dry, cold front that drove the storm shoved the warm evening air before it and away.

The temperature had already dropped a few degrees. The hairs on his arms stood, as crooked lines of blue-white fire danced in the Stygian tempest like the demons of some ancient mythology, come to demand sacrifice.

Maybe that’s next, Cooper thought. Burnt offerings to appease the dust, to ease the blight. Why stop at rejecting the last century-and-a-half of scientific achievement? Why not claw it all the way back to Babylon and Sumer?

The game was over, that much was sure. Already people were streaming from the stadium, kerchiefs over their faces ready for when the dust hit.

So much for the family evening out.

“Come on, guys,” Cooper said.

Cooper had hoped to outrun the dust storm at first, but that hope was dimming along with the light from the sun. Donald and the kids were frantically stuffing rags into vents, cracks, and anyplace the insidious dust might enter the truck.

He knew from experience it wouldn’t be enough.

Through the rearview mirror he saw the monster advancing, watched buildings and roads vanish into it. The truck was beginning to jerk and rock.

Then the wall hit them, and everything went dark. The wheel tried to wrench itself out of his hands as Cooper fought desperately to stay on the road—if he was even still on it. He couldn’t see more than a yard past his windshield, and the pavement was so cracked and eroded, it felt scarcely different from open ground under his tires. It would be easy to stray. Like Jansen, who had driven right into an old stream bed and been buried in a drift. Of course, Jansen never had much of a sense of direction in the best of times.

“It’s a bad one,” Donald noticed.

No shit, Cooper thought. The storm that had buried Jansen hadn’t been half as bad as this one. There couldn’t really be any doubt that they were getting worse as the years went on. Mother Nature reasserting her superiority with ever-increasing enthusiasm.

“Mask up, guys,” Cooper said. Murph and Tom both obeyed immediately, pulling surgical masks out of the glove compartment and fitting them onto their faces.

The truck shuddered as the storm moaned around them. Cooper navigated through the brief breaks in the darkness. Visibility could be measured in feet, and on two hands. Wind belted the truck, again and again.

Cooper’s one advantage was that the land around his place was pretty flat—no hills to pull, no downslopes. If he felt anything like that, it would mean he was way off target, and he would know instantly to slam on the brakes and wait it out.

In the end, it was mostly muscle memory that got them home. He’d made the trip from town so often that the distance and turns were furrowed into his brain. As they crept up to the farm, he finally had time to worry beyond the moment, to wonder what the damage would be this time, how many solar panels would need replacing, how many windows had been shattered. How much of the crop he was going to find flattened.

How long it would take to get the freaking dust off the floor, out of their bedclothes, cups, saucers, pitchers…

Underwear.

He peered out to get a better look, the house coming and going from vision in the black blizzard.

He jerked back as a sheet of metal slammed into the windshield. They waited a few moments to recover from the surprise, then Donald opened the passenger door, took Tom’s arm and the two of them started slogging, eyes closed, toward the house.

Cooper took hold of Murph and dragged her out of the vehicle.

Even with his eyes closed, the dust got in, and even with a mask on, some of it got to his lungs. And it was easy to get lost in one of these storms, even when you knew you were just a few feet away from safety—or at least protection from the wind that made projectiles out of everything not nailed down. Shielding Murph with his body, he pushed toward the house. Then he came up against the porch, put wood under his feet, and followed Donald and Tom through the front door.

It wasn’t, after all, his first storm.

Inside, shutters banged, dust jetted up through cracks in the floorboards and windowsills, and it rolled in through the front door in huge gusts until Donald slammed it shut behind them.

Cooper darted his gaze about, surveying the damage, and suddenly noticed a dark cloud rolling down the stairs.

Cooper looked at his kids.

“Did you both shut your windows?” he demanded. Tom nodded yes, but the expression on Murph’s face told him what he already knew. In a flash she was running up the stairs, hurrying to amend her mistake.

“Wait!” he cried, following her.

When he got to her room she was just standing there, staring at the floor, with the window still wide open. The rush and howl of the storm were fighting their way into the room. Suppressing some inelegant turns of phrase, he crossed the floor, gripped the wooden frame, and slammed it shut, instantly distancing the sounds.

Bereft of wind, the dust hung in the air, as fine and insidious as powdered graphite.

Murph just stood there, gawking at the floor, her eyes wide as dinner plates. And then Cooper saw why. Streaks were forming in the suspended dust, as if a giant invisible comb was being pulled through the air from floor to ceiling. Then he realized the dust was actually streaming down with unnatural speed, collecting on the floor; not randomly, but into lines—lines that formed into a distinguishable pattern.

“The ghost,” Murph said.

The ghost. Cooper didn’t bother to contradict her this time. He was too busy staring himself.

The dust was collecting as if it were falling on wires, but there were no wires to see. He was reminded of a very old toy which had been his uncle’s when he was a boy. Basically it consisted of a piece of cardboard with a human face drawn on it, covered by a flat plastic bubble. There were finely cut iron filings inside of the bubble. The toy came with a pencil-shaped magnet, and if you held the magnet behind the cardboard, you could drag the filings around to form hair and a beard on the face.

From the front it appeared as if an unseen force was dragging the filings into shape. Which of course was the case, since a magnetic field is invisible to the human eye. Yet the source of that little trick—the magnetic field—the magnet—could easily be discovered by any observer who looked behind the cardboard.

Not so, what was happening before his eyes.

Dust wasn’t metal. It wasn’t attracted by magnetic fields. And below the pattern there was only floor; no hand—human or otherwise—was wielding a hidden magnet. Yet undeniably, something was attracting the dust, and not randomly.

Someone was behind the cardboard with… something.

He felt a little prickle on the back of his spine. The drone. The harvesters.

Now this.

“Grab your pillow,” he told Murph. “Sleep in with Tom.”

She went, but with considerable hesitation.

SEVEN

Murph woke the next morning, trying to figure out what was wrong. Where she was. She certainly wasn’t in her room, but in a far smellier place.

Then the pile of covers on the bed snorted and she got it—she was in Tom’s room, for some reason.

Then she remembered it all. The dust storm, the open window, the ghost tracing lines with the dust. Trying to go to sleep, wanting desperately to see what the ghost had drawn. Then finally sleep, and crazier dreams than she usually had.

Now, at last, morning had come.

It was cold, so she wrapped herself in a blanket before leaving Tom’s room and padding down the hall to her own, worried there wouldn’t be anything—just a pile of dust. Just another thing for her dad to dismiss as nothing. As her imagination.

He was always ready to get into a fight when other people didn’t take her seriously—like at the school yesterday. But when it came down to it, he was the worst one of all.

So she went on to her room, braced for disappointment.

But when she walked quietly through the doorway, her dad was there already, and she realized with a shock that he might have been there all night.

The dust had settled now, leaving a thin mantel throughout the house, on everything. It all would need cleaning soon.

Except here, in her room.

Her dad was staring at a pattern of lines in the dust—some thick, some thinner. It reminded her of her drawing from the day before.

Murph sat down next to her dad. He didn’t say anything at first—just held up a coin.

“It’s not a ghost,” he said.

Then he tossed the coin across the pattern. The second it crossed a line, it turned and shot straight down to the floor.

“It’s gravity.”

Donald wearily traversed the stairs, where he found Cooper and Murph in Erin’s… Murph’s room, still studying the dust on the floor. They had been there all morning—probably all night, as well.

Neither of them looked up when he came in.

“I’m dropping Tom,” Donald informed him, “then heading to town.” He glanced down at the pattern on the floor, at the little science-fair project with which Cooper and Murph were both obsessed.

“You wanna clean that up when you’ve finished praying to it?” he gruffed.

No answer.

All right then…

As he left, Cooper wordlessly took Murph’s notebook from her hands and started scribbling in it.

After Grandpa and Tom left, Murph spent a lot of time thinking about her ghost, and what it was trying to tell her.

She was glad Dad was finally paying attention to the strange things that had been happening in her room, but in a way she was starting to feel a little vexed. This was her investigation, wasn’t it? He had told her that himself, challenged her to make it all scientific. Well, she’d taken him at his word, and still he hadn’t taken her seriously.

Now, when he saw something weird, he was all over it.

With her notebook.

At some point her belly began to growl, so she went downstairs and made sandwiches. She poured two glasses of water and took it all up to her room. Dad was probably hungry, too, since he hadn’t had breakfast.

This time when she came in, he looked up at her.

“I got something,” he said, pointing to the thick and thin lines. “Binary. Thick is one, thin is zero.”

He was excited, she could tell. Maybe more excited than she had ever seen him. His eyes were bright and a little grin hung on his face. He held up her notebook and showed her pairs of numbers he had scribbled there.

“Coordinates,” he said.

A few minutes later, he had pulled a bunch of maps from a closet and had spread them on the kitchen table. He extracted a couple from the stack and tossed them aside, then tapped one and spread it out fully, tracing his finger across the contours, crossing the blue squiggles of streams that were now dry beds, past the names of towns where empty buildings crumbled gradually into the soil and dust.

He wondered if there would ever be any new maps. Maybe. But not like this one, informed by satellites and flyovers. No, the next maps would be made with tape measures and alidades, by men and women carrying machetes to clear the brush.

If they were lucky. If surveying even survived the “revised” textbooks.

His finger settled on the spot where the prescribed longitude and latitude met. There was nothing marked on the map, but he hadn’t expected there to be.

Time for a road trip, he thought eagerly.

EIGHT

Murph watched Cooper with an unhappy expression on her face as he stuffed sleeping bag, flashlight, and other supplies into the truck.

“You can’t leave me behind!” she protested again.

“Grandpa’s back in two hours,” he told her. But he knew that wasn’t what she meant.

“You don’t know what you’re going to find!” she said.

“That’s why I can’t take you,” he said. What wasn’t she getting? Why couldn’t she understand? When gravity writes map directions on the floor of your house, you don’t take your little girl to find out how and why. He wasn’t an idiot.

She blinked at him angrily, and then ran back toward the house.

So she’ll be mad at me for a while, he figured. I’ll find a way to make it up to her. It was better than putting her at risk.

A few minutes later, satisfied with his loading, Cooper went back into the house for the maps and some bottled water. He hesitated a moment, looking up the stairs to where Murph was probably sulking in her room.

“Murph!” he called, but she didn’t answer. Which wasn’t surprising. He wondered if he should go up and talk to her, but he felt like it would just be a waste of time.

“Murph, just wait here for Grandpa,” he yelled up. “Tell him I’ll call him on the radio.”

Then he went back through the door, climbed into his truck, and headed out.

Toward what? His daughter had a gravitational anomaly in her bedroom. Well, there were gravitational anomalies all around the world—plenty of them if you weren’t too picky by what you meant. Gravity and mass were intimately linked—the more massive something was, the more it bent space-time, the more it attracted other bodies.

But anomalies didn’t tend to pop up in the course of a day, in a tiny spot in someone’s house, someone’s bedroom. And they didn’t usually present patterns that turned out to be map coordinates, translated into binary code. Coordinates to a place that was relatively nearby.

He spread the map across the steering wheel and looked around for a pen. There wasn’t one in the passenger seat, or the glove compartment, so he reached down to the passenger-side leg space, where a blanket covered a clutter of stuff. He lifted up the blanket.

A grinning face suddenly appeared, framed in red hair.

“Jesus!” he yelped, his hand snapping back in surprise.

Laughing—laughing—Murph climbed up into the shotgun seat.

“It’s not funny,” he began, but she just kept cackling. He started to scold her again, then he chuckled.

Then he laughed, too.

“You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me,” she pointed out, after her giggles died down.

It felt good, he realized. Laughing with her. Sharing this with her.

He still didn’t like putting her in danger, but this might be a good thing in the long run, this little road trip together.

Cooper handed her the map.

“Fair enough,” he said, suppressing one last chuckle. “Make yourself useful.”

Up ahead, far across the plain, the mountains lay slumped on the horizon—and somewhere among those peaks, they would find their destination. He figured they’d be there by dark.

Murph fell asleep a little before they entered the foothills. He glanced at her in the light of dusk, at the features that so oddly mingled his with her mother’s. He wondered, briefly, who she would become, who she would be.

Not a farmer, he was sure of that. Not a farmer’s wife. Not even in this “caretaker” world of theirs, where people gradually got used to fewer and fewer choices, until there were none at all.

He shifted his attention again to the dark foothills, his mind turning back to the binary code that had infested his house. Did it really make sense? Was he reading meaning into a random pattern?

How could anyone refuse to believe mankind had gone to the moon?

He didn’t blame Murph for taking a poke at those kids.

Cooper took a turn, and then another, winding his way along a narrow road. They were in a mountain pass as night fell complete, and his old friends the stars began looking down through the thinner air of the mountains. Then he felt a yearning that he almost thought he’d forgotten. He felt as if he had somehow left the world he knew, heading for an earlier, younger one. In the dark, with mountains all around and no corn anywhere to be seen, it might have been twenty years ago, or more.

It could have been anytime. Except for the girl, sleeping in the passenger’s seat. Time’s arrow made visible.

He was still considering the tyranny of entropy when he arrived at the coordinates. He was there—or as near there as he could get with a chain-link fence in his way.

He stared at it for a moment, wondering why this place, why here? He didn’t see anything special beyond the barrier, certainly nothing cosmic enough to warrant a message written in gravity. But this was it—the moment when he would learn whether he was inspired or delusional.

The answer lay just yards away. And it was denied to him by the fence.

His daughter was still asleep.

“Murph,” he said, gently. “Murph.” She opened her eyes and looked groggily around, struggling to sit up.

He nodded at the fence.

“I think this is as far as we get.”

Murph glanced at the fence and then closed her eyes again.

“Why?” she asked sleepily. “You didn’t bring the bolt cutters?”

He felt a smile broaden his face. That was his girl.

“I like your spirit, young lady,” he said.

He exited the cab and got the bolt cutters out of the back, feeling the palm-slicked wood of the handles, cool to the touch. He looked either way, up and down the road, but there was no light, no sound, only the quiet of a mountain night. He reached out with the cutters, laying their steel jaws to the fence…

Blinding light exploded and he threw his hands up to protect his eyes. A voice boomed, harsh, artificial—electronic.

“Step away from the fence.”

He dropped the cutters and threw his hands up in the air. He still couldn’t see anything but the glare of the spotlights.

“Don’t shoot!” he hollered. “My child is in the car! I’m unarmed! My daughter is—”

From the car, Murph heard a sharp snapping sound and instantly sat upright. She saw a flash of actinic blue light as her father jerked, and then dropped like a sack of grain. She felt the car tremble and heard the thud of massive footfalls as she scrambled back in the seat, trying to think—trying not to think about what had just happened to her dad…

The door was suddenly yanked open, and blinding light poured in.

“Don’t be afraid,” a weird, inhuman voice said.

But she was, and she screamed.

NINE

Cooper woke to brightness. Not sunlight. Not the glare of the floodlights—no, this was what he remembered from his youth in government buildings, supermarkets, hospitals.

Institutional lighting.

Everything around him fit with it, too. Each surface was clean, polished, maintained—and uncannily dust-free. And the air smelled funny. Or rather, it didn’t smell. Not at all. He was so used to the smell of dust and blight that they only became truly apparent by their absence. The air he was breathing now was filtered, scrubbed. Clean.

If he was forced to guess, he imagined he was in some sort of industrial complex.

Yet that was impossible.

He was sitting in a chair, facing a big grey rectangular slab of metal with many dozens of articulated segments—a cuboid of lots of smaller cuboids, like the blocks he’d had as a kid that snapped together to build things.

The machine had a data screen near the top.

Memories began to whirl. He remembered the shock jolting through his body. He remembered…

Murph!

He cast about frantically, looking for his daughter.

“How did you find this place?” the slab asked in its electronic voice. The voice from the chain-link fence.

“Where’s my daughter?” Cooper demanded. His whole body was prickling with fear now, and anger.

“You had the coordinates for this facility marked on your map,” the machine said, ignoring his question. “Where did you get them?”

Cooper leaned toward the thing.

“Where’s my daughter!” he bellowed, but the machine didn’t answer. Cooper studied it a little more, collecting himself.

“You might think you’re still in the marines,” he told it, “but the marines don’t exist anymore, pal. I’ve got grunts like you mowing my grass…”

Suddenly the two outer sections of the machine lengthened and the central slab leaned forward, so now it looked like a fat rectangle standing on thick, blocky crutches. Coming down on him.

“How did you find us?” it demanded.

“But you don’t look like a lawn mower to me,” Cooper plowed on. “You, I’m gonna turn into an overqualified vacuum cleaner—”

“No, you’re not,” a woman’s voice told him.

Cooper turned.

The woman was thirty-something, with short brown hair, wide dark eyes and an expressive mouth. She wore a black sweater and she seemed—like the place—very clean.

“TARS,” she said to the machine, “back down, please.”

The old military device complied, its “limbs” folding back into the torso to become a cuboid once more.

Cooper considered the woman, looking for some clue as to who she might be, who she represented. Had he stumbled upon some sort of illegal operation? Unfortunately, that would account for a lot of the facts on the ground. The secrecy, the hidden robots, the threat to his person—Murph’s disappearance. But how did that fit with the bizarre message on the bedroom floor?

And what were they doing? Manufacturing arms, maybe? Was there a nation someplace, ready to break the international disarmament treaty? He knew things were tough, but surely everyone knew by now that a return to war would only make things worse.

What if it was his own government running this show? That was actually the worst-case scenario, he realized. Maybe the message on Murph’s floor hadn’t been meant to draw him here, but to warn him away. Maybe it had something to do with the drone.

The woman was studying him, as well, and didn’t seem all that impressed by what she saw. That kind of pissed him off.

“You’re taking a risk using ex-military for security,” he told her. “They’re old, their control units are unpredictable.”

“Well, that’s what the government could spare,” she said.

The government. Well, that answered one question. It wasn’t the answer he wanted. But at least she was talking.

“Who are you?” Cooper demanded.

“Dr. Brand,” she replied.

Cooper paused. The name was familiar.

“I knew a Dr. Brand once,” he said tentatively. “But he was a professor—”

“What makes you think I’m not?” she interrupted, frowning at him.

“—and nowhere near as cute,” he finished.

An expression falling somewhere between incredulity and disgust crossed her face.

“You think you can flirt your way out of this mess?” she said.

What the hell was I thinking? he wondered frantically. Suddenly, his fear for Murph was stronger than ever. He was in waaaay over his head, and bluster wasn’t going to do him any good.

The problem was, he wasn’t sure how to approach any of this. It was too sudden, too disorienting, and he couldn’t shake the images of what might have happened or be happening to his daughter. He’d felt something like this before, over the Straights, when the computer had ejected him from his aircraft.

Helpless. Not steering his own ship.

He had to focus his thoughts.

“Dr. Brand,” he said quietly, “I have no idea what this ‘mess’ is. I’m scared for my little girl, and I want her by my side. Then I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” He paused to let that sink in. “Okay?”

It felt to him like she considered his plea for a long time before turning back to the machine.

“Get the principals and the girl into the conference room,” she said, before returning her attention to Cooper. “Your daughter’s fine,” she said. “Bright kid. Must have a very smart mother.”

As Brand led him down a corridor, Cooper was acutely aware that the robot was there, too, only a pace or so behind him—well within striking distance. And for all of his talk of turning the thing into a toaster or whatever, he knew that in a straight-up fight he didn’t have the slightest chance against it. It could split his skull with a single economical motion.

So there was no point in worrying about it. Instead, he put his mind to sussing out where they were. Or, perhaps more importantly, what this place had been built to accomplish.

Whatever it was, Cooper realized, the amount of time they’d spent walking said that it was big—bigger than an arms factory needed to be. Unless they were building nukes, and the ICBMs required to send them out.

That might explain it. Running with the thought, he began to build scenarios. A neutron bomb detonated over, say, the Ukrainian breadbasket, would kill the crops and all of the farmers—and the fields could be used again within a year or two. More food for team America.

Could that be the mission? He really didn’t want to believe it.

And yet, there were lots of corridors going off in all directions. They had to go somewhere. He didn’t see any windows, skylights, or doors that showed the outside world, though. So were they underground?

It seemed the likely explanation. Otherwise, someone would have stumbled upon this place a long time ago. And an underground facility would be perfect for building big, nasty, unethical things. Hell, this could even be one of the old NORAD installations, replete with the remains of a once-vast nuclear arsenal.

He’d never heard anything about a base being located in this particular mountain range, but what he didn’t know about the old Cold War would fill volumes of books.

The more he saw, the less reassured he was. Even if it was underground, a place like this would need supplies. To hide something this big would take a certain of amount of… determination. Attention to detail.

He thought again of the military robot clanking along behind him, always within arm’s reach.

“It’s pretty clear you don’t want visitors,” he said. “Why not let us back up from your fence, and be on our way?”

“It’s not that simple,” Brand said.

“Sure it is,” he said, trying not to sound panicky. “I don’t know anything about you or this place.”

“Yes, you do,” she countered. Which didn’t sound good at all, because that meant even knowing the coordinates was too much.

TEN

After a bit more fretting and walking, they arrived at their destination. It was a typical, old-fashioned conference room, with a series of photos on the walls and a large table in the middle. No window, of course.

She ushered him in.

There were several people present, but the only one who came into focus for him was Murph. Still alive, thank God, and apparently in one piece. At least for the moment.

But he couldn’t shake the sense that they were deep underground, that no one knew where they were, and that if they went missing, no one would ever know why. Tom would take over the farm, and Donald would help as long as he was able. People would wonder a little what had happened to old Cooper and his daughter.

“Probably just got buried in a dust storm,” most would say. People didn’t have a lot of time or tolerance for mysteries these days.

An old man was crouched down next to Murph, talking to her. She looked up when he came in.

“Dad!” she shouted, and she bounded across the room into his arms. For a moment he was lost in just having her there, but when he saw the old man stand and smile at him, recognition struck him almost physically.

“Hello, Cooper,” the man said.

For a moment he couldn’t say anything.

“Professor Brand?” he finally managed.

“Just take a seat, Mr. Cooper,” one of the men at the table—youngish, with black hair and a beard—said. Professor Brand remained silent.

Head reeling, Cooper did as he was asked, drawing up a seat. Murph sat beside him. There were five other people sitting at the table. One—an older fellow with glasses and an air of authority—leaned toward them.

“Explain how you found this facility,” he demanded.

“Stumbled across it,” Cooper lied. “Looking for salvage and I saw the fence—”

The man held up a hand and stopped him. The tight wrinkles that formed his face clinched into disapproving lines.

“You’re sitting in the world’s best-kept secret,” he said. “You don’t stumble in. And you certainly don’t stumble out.”

“Cooper, please,” Professor Brand said, his voice as even and soothing as it had been decades before. “Cooperate with these people.”

The professor was a good guy, at least as Cooper remembered him. Not the sort of man who would end up in anything unsavory. But there were a great many things he once thought of as true.

Still, when he looked at Professor Brand, he wanted to trust him.

Maybe the truth is our best bet, Cooper thought. But as he examined the unfriendly faces surrounding him, he realized how crazy the truth was going to sound.

“It’s hard to explain,” he began, “but we learned these coordinates from an anomaly…”

“What sort of anomaly?” another man demanded. It was the black-haired fellow who had first told Cooper to sit down. There was an intensity about the question, and as soon as it was asked, everyone else at the table seemed to become a little more alert.

“I don’t want to term it ‘supernatural,’” Cooper said, “but…”

A couple of them looked away in what appeared to be frustration. Whatever it was they wanted to hear, he wasn’t saying it. Then the man with the glasses leaned forward again, his face and tone deadly serious.

“You’re going to have to be specific, Mr. Cooper,” he said. “Real quick.”

Okay, here goes…

“After the last dust storm,” Cooper said. “It was a pattern… in dust…”

“It was gravity,” Murph stated flatly.

And suddenly everyone was gawking at his daughter, as excited as kids on Christmas morning. The black-haired man—the young, bearded one without glasses—looked at Professor Brand, then turned to Cooper.

“Where was this gravitational anomaly?” he asked.

Again, Cooper ran his gaze around the room.

“Look,” he said, cautiously, “I’m happy you’re excited about gravity, but if you want more answers from us I’m gonna need assurances.”

“Assurances?” the bespectacled man said.

Cooper covered Murph’s ears with his palms. She gave him a look, but he ignored it.

“That we’re getting out of here,” he whispered fiercely. “And not in the trunk of some car.”

Suddenly the younger Dr. Brand began… laughing. Whatever reaction Cooper was expecting, that wasn’t it. Even the man with the glasses smiled.

“Don’t you know who we are, Coop?” Professor Brand looked at him, apparently bemused. Cooper began to think everyone but him knew the joke.

“No,” Cooper said, feeling like he was going out of his mind. “No, I don’t.”

Brand—the pretty one—pointed around the table.

“Williams,” she said, naming the man with the glasses. Then she continued, “Doyle, Jenkins, Smith. You already know my father, Professor Brand.

“We’re NASA.”

“NASA?”

“NASA,” Professor Brand affirmed. “Same NASA you flew for.”

Everyone chuckled, and suddenly Cooper was laughing, too. Relief washed through him like a clear spring of water. Then he glanced at Murph, who looked confused, not getting the gist of it at all.

But then one of the walls began to open, and through the gap, Cooper saw something he had never imagined he would see again. The flared exhaust nozzles of a booster rocket.

“I heard you got shut down for refusing to drop bombs from the stratosphere onto starving people,” Cooper said to Professor Brand as they entered the chamber with the spacecraft and passed on through to another part of the complex.

The professor shook his head.

“When they realized killing other people wasn’t the long-term solution, they needed us back,” he said. “Set us up in the old NORAD facility. In secret.”

Well, I was right about the NORAD part, at least.

“Why secret?” Cooper asked.

“Public opinion won’t allow spending on space exploration,” the professor said. “Not when we’re struggling to put food on the table.”

That’s why so much effort has been put into convincing folks that the space program was a myth, a scam, Cooper realized with sudden clarity. He remembered again the conversation with Murph’s teacher, Miss Hanley. What was it she had said? “Our children need to learn about this planet. Not tales of leaving it.”

As if the Earth existed without the sun, the planets, the stars, the rest of the universe. As if staring harder at the dirt would give them all the answers they needed.

They approached a large door. Professor Brand opened it, and waved him through.

Like everything he had encountered in the last twenty-four hours, what greeted Cooper wasn’t what he was expecting. It took him a moment, in fact, to grasp what he was seeing. His first impression was of being outside, but it took only heartbeats for that notion to fade. Instead, he found himself looking at the largest greenhouse complex he had ever seen. Fields the size of plantations, all under glass.

“Blight,” the professor said. “Wheat seven years ago, okra this year. Now there’s just corn.”

Something about that stung a little. He was, after all, a farmer.

“But we’re growing more now than ever,” he protested.

“Like the potatoes in Ireland, like the wheat in the dust bowl, the corn will die,” Professor Brand said. “Soon.”

Behind them, the young Dr. Brand entered with Murph, who looked around in undisguised awe. Cooper had seen places like this, albeit long ago. Murph had never seen anything of the kind.

She also looked bleary-eyed.

“Murph is a little tired,” the younger Brand said. “I’m taking her to my office for a nap.”

Cooper nodded, a little relieved. This was probably a conversation his daughter did not need to hear.

“We’ll find a way,” Cooper objected, once she was out of earshot. “We always have.”

“Driven by the unshakable faith that the Earth is ours,” Professor Brand added, a bit sarcastically.

“Not just ours,” Cooper said. “But it is our home.”

The professor regarded him coolly.

“Earth’s atmosphere is 80 percent nitrogen,” he pointed out. “We don’t even breathe nitrogen.” He pointed to a stalk of corn. The leaves were blotched and striped with grey, which along with the ashen, tumescent blobs of infected kernels were the telltale signs of infection.

“Blight does,” the professor continued. “And as it thrives, our air contains less and less oxygen.” He gestured toward Murph. “The last people to starve will be the first to suffocate. Your daughter’s generation will be the last to survive on Earth.”

Cooper stared at him. He wanted to continue to protest, to advocate for hope. New strains of corn could be bred. The answer to the blight might come the day after tomorrow. Human beings were resourceful—it was their hallmark as a race.

But in the pith of him, he knew that everything Professor Brand was saying was true. Unbidden, he experienced an image of Murph, gasping for breath, her eyes, mouth and nostrils caked with dust…

He turned to the professor.

“Tell me this is where you explain how you’re going to save the world,” he said.

Their next stop was another room, this one on a scale that dwarfed even the last. But this time he knew instantly what he was seeing, and it brought long-buried feelings rushing back, hard.

It was a multi-stage rocket—a big one—contained in a vastly larger cylindrical chamber. In fact, the launch chamber seemed far larger than necessary, by several orders of magnitude. He felt like an ant in a grain silo. High, high above, light shone, this time unmistakably that of the sun, reflected in by a ring of mirrors.

From the look of things, it appeared to be dawn outside.

“We’re not meant to save the world,” Professor Brand said. “We’re meant to leave it.”

Cooper couldn’t take his eyes off of the rocket. He let his gaze travel up, taking in every beautiful inch of her, not in a hurry. When he reached the top he saw two sleek craft mounted there, belly-to-belly, and he knew them.

“Rangers,” he murmured. Lineal descendants of the rocket planes like the X-15, and the space shuttles that followed, the winged Rangers could maneuver easily in an atmosphere. Unlike their predecessors, however, they were equally suited for deep space—at least in theory. None of them had ever made it there before the program was cut.

Or so he had believed. So he had been told when he was forced to retire, sent to “do his duty” in the fields, almost two decades ago.

“The last components of our one versatile ship in orbit, the Endurance,” Professor Brand said. “Our final expedition.”

Final, Cooper thought, in a daze. That suggested others. And there had been a fair number of craft in his day. He’d assumed they’d been broken up and recast as farm equipment. But now…

“What happened to the other vehicles?” Cooper asked.

A new, unreadable expression played across the old man’s face.

“The Lazarus missions,” he said.

“Sounds cheerful,” Cooper replied.

“Lazarus came back from the dead—” Dr. Brand began.

“He had to die in the first place,” Cooper interjected. “You sent people out there looking for a new home…?” He trailed off, incredulous, but Professor Brand just nodded as if it all made perfect sense.

“There’s no planet in our solar system that can support life,” Cooper said. “And it’d take them a thousand years to reach the nearest star. That doesn’t even qualify as futile…” He shook his head. “Where did you send them, Professor?”

“Cooper,” Professor Brand said, “I can’t tell you any more unless you agree to pilot this craft.”

Cooper stared at him, dumbfounded.

“You’re the best we ever had,” the older man added.

What was he talking about? It had been decades. Everything Cooper had experienced, through most of his adult life, told him this whole thing was impossible. And yet…

To be asked to participate sent an undeniable thrill through him.

Which in turn made him more cautious than ever.

“I barely left the stratosphere,” Cooper objected.

“This crew’s never left the simulator,” the professor said. “We can’t program this mission from Earth, and we don’t know what’s out there. We need a pilot. And this is the mission you were trained for.”

Cooper thought back to his training. Sure as hell no one had ever mentioned anything like this to him. He’d thought Mars, maybe, or Europa at the outside.

“Without ever knowing,” he said. “An hour ago, you didn’t even know I was still alive. And you were going anyway.”

“We had no choice,” Professor Brand said. “But something brought you here. They chose you.”

He felt a little chill at that, remembering Murph’s ghost, the lines in the dust, the coordinates that showed him the way to this place and these people. In the back of his mind, he’d thought he would find the mysterious messenger here, but by now it was clear that wasn’t the case.

Yet from the professor’s words, he understood that there was a messenger. It wasn’t all some figment of his imagination.

“Who’s ‘they?’” he asked.

But the professor fell silent. Cooper knew the drill. The man had baited the hook, and he was biding his time until the fish was firmly on the line.

Cooper thought about it, about the impossibility—and the possibility—of what the professor was saying.

“How long would I be gone?” he finally asked.

“Hard to know,” Brand said. “Years.”

“I’ve got my kids, professor,” he said.

The professor nodded, then looked up, solemn and serious.

“Get out there and save them,” he said.

Years, Cooper thought. Years. And yet, the chance to do this. To live in a dream that had almost faded away; to go out there, push at the boundaries of what was known. To do something that could save his kids, save everyone…

But years?

He met the professor’s gaze.

“Who’s ‘they?’” he repeated.

ELEVEN

Back in the conference room, an image of the solar system appeared on the screen, and a fellow who had been introduced to him as Romilly stood next to it.

He was a young man with a smooth, almost polished scalp, a close-cropped beard, black hair and striking dark features. He couldn’t be older than thirty-five. He seemed shy, and spoke in an odd, clipped, almost distracted fashion.

“We started detecting gravitational anomalies almost fifty years ago,” Romilly said. “Mostly small distortions in the upper atmosphere—I believe you encountered one yourself.”

At first Cooper assumed Romilly meant the pattern in Murph’s room, but then the “upper atmosphere” part registered, and his eyes widened as it came back to him.

His instruments going crazy.

Controls ripped from his hands…

“Over the Straights,” he blurted. “My crash—something tripped my fly-by wire.”

“Exactly,” Romilly said. “But the most significant anomaly was this…” Saturn suddenly took front and center, with its banded, ochre clouds, expansive rings, and mysterious moons. But when Romilly zoomed in, it wasn’t on the planet or any of its satellites, but on a small group of stars.

As the magnification increased, Cooper could see they were rippling, as if seen through a perturbed pool of water.

“A disturbance in space-time, out near Saturn,” Romilly said.

Cooper studied the disfigured constellations.

“A wormhole?” Cooper asked, doubtfully. It just didn’t seem possible.

“It appeared forty-eight years ago,” Romilly confirmed.

A wormhole, his brain repeated. A wormhole!

There were two essential problems with star travel. The first was that space was big—really big. Things were really far apart. The nearest star to Earth, other than the sun, was so far away that it took light more than four years to make the trip.

A starship traveling at half the speed of light would require more than sixteen years to make the round trip to their nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri. But that was moot, because no ship he was aware of could go even the tiniest significant fraction of the speed of light.

So a trip to Proxima would take tens of thousands of years for any ship humanity had ever built. Other stars—the ones more likely to have life-bearing planets—were much, much further away.

But a wormhole… That was the northwest passage of star travel—or more aptly, the Panama Canal—the shortcut that meant you didn’t have to sail all the way around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope, just to get from Hong Kong to New York.

Except a wormhole was better than that. It was a tunnel that just cut through all of that bothersome distance separating one place from another. And you did it in a fraction of the travel time. Relativity predicted wormholes, he remembered, but no one had ever seen one. They remained in the realm of theory.

Or so he’d thought. Yet here he was looking at one.

“Where does it lead?” Cooper asked.

“Another galaxy,” Romilly said.

Another galaxy? Cooper tried to bend that through his mind. Those distorted stars didn’t belong to Earth’s sky, or to the sky of any planet in the Milky Way. That, at least, was what Romilly was claiming. On one level, the very idea seemed preposterous. Yet these people seemed very serious about it indeed.

And there was something else. Something he remembered from his studies, back in the day.

“A wormhole isn’t a naturally occurring phenomenon,” Cooper said.

It was Dr. Brand who responded.

“Someone placed it there,” she agreed, trying to suppress a smile, her dark eyes challenging him to believe her.

“‘They,’” he said.

She nodded. “And whoever ‘they’ are, they appear to be looking out for us,” she said. “That wormhole lets us travel to other stars. It came along right as we needed it.”

“They’ve put potentially habitable worlds within our reach,” Doyle put in, excitement tangible in his voice. “Twelve, in fact, judging from our initial probes.”

“You sent probes into it?” Cooper asked.

“We sent people into it,” Professor Brand said. “Ten years ago.”

“The Lazarus missions,” Cooper guessed.

Professor Brand rose and gestured at the walls of the conference room, where twelve portraits hung. Cooper had noticed them before, but hadn’t studied them in detail.

They all were of astronauts, garbed in white spacesuits, sans masks, with the American flag and NASA logo on their shoulders. He had assumed the portraits dated to decades ago, but now he realized he didn’t recognize any of their faces. These were astronauts he could not name.

“Twelve possible worlds,” the professor said. “Twelve Ranger launches carrying the bravest humans ever to live, led by the remarkable Dr. Mann.”

Doyle picked up from there. In contrast with Romilly, Doyle had a sort of focused intensity.

“Each person’s landing pod had sufficient life support for two years,” he explained, “but they could use hibernation to stretch that, making observations on organics over a decade or more. Their mission was to assess their world, and if it was showing promise, send a signal, bed down for a long nap, and wait to be rescued.”

Cooper tried to imagine that. Alone, inconceivably far away from home, gambling everything on finding one habitable world out of twelve.

“And if their world didn’t show promise?” Cooper asked.

“Hence the bravery,” Doyle replied.

“Because you don’t have the resources to visit all twelve,” Cooper said.

“No,” Doyle confirmed. “Data transmission back through the wormhole is rudimentary—simple binary ‘pings’ on an annual basis, to give some clue as to which worlds have potential.” He paused, then added, “One system shows promise.”

“One?” Cooper said. “Kind of a long shot.”

Doyle shook his head, and his blue eyes flashed confidence.

“One system with three potential worlds,” Dr. Brand said. “No long shot.”

Cooper paused a moment to let it sink in. Three worlds, each—or all—offering potential new homes. Hope for his children and grandchildren. But if this ship, this Endurance was the only remaining deep-space vessel…

“So if we find a new home,” he asked, “what then?”

Professor Brand shot him an approving look.

“That’s the long shot,” he said. “There’s plan A, and there’s plan B. Did you notice anything strange about the launch chamber?”

The first time Cooper had been in the launch chamber, all he had been able to see was the rocket boosters and the Rangers perched upon it. Sure, he had off-handedly noticed that the chamber was a little bigger than it needed to be. But now, as he really studied it, he realized it was huge. Mind-bogglingly so.

It was shaped and proportioned something like a traditional grain silo, but if it was scaled down to the size of a grain silo, the Rangers and their boosters would become little more than largish models. The actual circumference of the upright cylinder looked to be as much as a third of a mile.

Hell, it might be more.

Though that was unusual, it wasn’t really the strangest part—not by far. The walls of the vast cylinder weren’t smooth, the way a normal launch silo would be. Normally, a silo’s main function was to shield the rest of the compound from a launch or—in the worst-case scenario—an explosion. So there would be no protuberances.

High above where he stood, several odd structures had been built onto the interior surface—were still being constructed, in fact. He couldn’t imagine what they were, though, or what their uses might be. Some almost looked like buildings, but jutting out at weird angles that would make them unusable.

Suddenly his perspective shifted, and dizzyingly. What if the structures actually were buildings? Houses, schools, other facilities. At the very thought, their purposes became clear. And yet, they were built along the curve, horizontal to the ground, useless…

On Earth, he thought. They’d be useless here on Earth. With a planetary gravity. But in space, with the vast cylinder spinning along its axis, “down” would be relative. The entire inner surface of the cylinder would become the ground on which folks would walk.

“This whole facility,” he began, still not quite believing what he was saying, “it’s a vehicle? A space station?”

“Both,” Professor Brand said. “We’ve been working on it—and others like it—for twenty-five years. Plan A.”

Cooper ran his gaze around the inside-out world that was still a work in progress. He’d seen designs for things like this, but they were meant to be built in space, not beneath the surface of a planet.

“How does it get off the Earth?” he asked. It seemed undoable. Even if there were thrusters powerful enough to push it into orbit, the entire structure would break up under the acceleration. No object so large could handle the force necessary to escape Earth’s pull.

“Those first gravitational anomalies changed everything,” Professor Brand explained. “Suddenly we knew that harnessing gravity was real. So I started working on the theory—and we started building this station.”

Cooper heard something in the professor’s tone.

“But you haven’t solved it yet,” he guessed, and the older man nodded grimly.

“That’s why there’s a plan B,” Dr. Brand said, her dark eyes studying him. Weighing him up, maybe? Trying to decide if he was worthy?

She motioned, and led Cooper to a nearby lab full of devices built for purposes he couldn’t even guess. They came to a stop in front of a vault made of glass and steel. It housed a series of movable shelves fronted by circular white seals. Dr. Brand grasped a handle on one and turned. The seal opened and she pulled out a cylindrical steel unit housing a multitude of glass vials.

Condensation sighed out from the now empty cavity, like a breath on a cold day.

“The problem is gravity,” she said. “How to get a viable amount of human life off this planet. This is one way. Plan B—a population bomb. Almost five thousand fertilized eggs, preserved in containers weighing in at under nine hundred kilos.”

Five thousand children, he thought. Five thousand, in this little vault, waiting to be brought into the world.

“How could you raise them?” Cooper asked.

“With equipment on board, we incubate the first ten,” Brand replied, as if she was talking about planting corn. “After that, with surrogacy, the growth becomes exponential. Within thirty years, we might have a colony of hundreds. The real difficulty of colonization is genetic diversity.” She pointed to the glass vials enclosed by the device. “This takes care of that.”

Cooper looked at the thing, an uncomfortable feeling growing in the back of his mind. Genetic diversity, sure—five thousand fertilized eggs could be selected to represent the entire range of human variation. Efficient, maybe, but it was clinical, cold. And it presented one huge problem.

“So we just give up on people here?” he asked.

“That’s why plan A’s a lot more fun,” Dr. Brand said.

Cooper thought about the huge Earthbound station. How much had it cost? What a massive gamble—every dime spent here was a dime not being spent trying to beat the blight, to feed the people of the planet. Was the professor really that sure he could pull this out of his hat? He seemed to have convinced all of the right people that he could.

Maybe the professor is right, he mused. He knows a helluva lot more than I do about the big picture. Maybe whoever was studying the blight had decided it couldn’t be fought—that, as Professor Brand said, it was just a matter of time. Maybe they were spending resources on this project because, no matter how far-fetched the whole thing seemed, it was the only hope humanity had.

A lot of really smart people had to have bought into the idea.

Of course, even smart people can be wrong.

Still, it was all better than what he had feared at first. They hadn’t turned back to weapons, thank God, and war. He hadn’t stumbled onto a plan to take what little was left and hoard it away. They weren’t trying to squeeze the last remaining drops of life from the dirt.

No, instead of looking down, they were looking up.

They had turned back to the stars.

Later, Professor Brand showed him the equations. Cooper had had plenty of math back in the day, but it had been more applied than theoretical, so this was all way beyond him. The equations covered more than a dozen blackboards in the professor’s office, complete with diagrams, and while he could pick out parts of it, the rest might as well have been written in cuneiform, as far as he was concerned.

“Where have you got to?” Cooper asked.

“Almost there,” Professor Brand assured him.

“Almost? You’re asking me to hang everything on ‘almost?’”

The professor stepped a little closer.

“I’m asking you to trust me,” he said. Professor Brand’s eyes were burning with what seemed like a limitless passion, and Cooper realized that the old man had thrown all of himself into this. He believed—really believed—that it could be done. Cooper had seen glimpses of this fervor before, back in the day, but he had never understood what lay behind it.

Now he did. The survival of the human race.

“All those years of training,” he said. “You never told me.”

“We can’t always be open about everything, Coop, even if we want to be.” The professor paused, and then he said, “What can you tell your children about this mission?”

That was a tender point, one he had already been considering. What would he tell Tom and Murph? That the world was ending? That he was going off into space to try and save it? And if he had known all those years ago he was training for such a mission, how would he have reacted?

There was no way to know. So much time had passed, so much had occurred, he barely knew the young man he had once been.

“Find us a new home,” the professor said. “When you return, I’ll have solved the problem of gravity. You have my word.”

TWELVE

The truck had barely rolled to a stop before Murph swung the door open and dashed for the house. On the porch, Donald watched her whiz past, then shot his son-in-law a questioning look.

Cooper simply shook his head and followed Murph inside and up the stairs. He heard a dragging sound coming from her room.

When he tried to open her door, it only cracked a little—from what he could tell, she had stacked a desk and a chair against it.

“Murph?” he attempted.

“Go!” she shouted. “If you’re leaving, just go!”

Donald listened in his usual way, without many interruptions or much expression, just taking it in as it came. It was a little cool on the porch, but Cooper preferred to be out beneath the night sky, rather than in the house.

After a time, he’d given Donald the full story of what had happened to him and Murph. He sat back to see how the old man would react.

“This world was never enough for you, was it, Coop?” Donald said.

Cooper didn’t answer right away. He knew it was an indictment, that there was an accusation there. Donald took things as they came. He might grouse a little here and there, but he was adaptable. And he was good at finding the virtue in whatever situation presented itself. He was a man who counted his blessings more often than he railed against injustice.

Nothing wrong with that, Cooper mused. The world needed people like Donald, and always had. But it needed more than one kind of person. It needed the men who sailed dangerous seas, to discover unknown lands. Those men had not been—for the most part—of the “count-your-blessings” sort.

“I’m not gonna lie to you, Donald,” Cooper said. “Heading out there is what I feel born to do, and it excites me. That doesn’t make it wrong.”

Donald thought about that for a moment.

“It might,” the old man countered. “Don’t trust the right thing, done for the wrong reason. The ‘why’ of a thing—that’s the foundation.”

“Well, the foundation’s solid,” Cooper said, a bit sadly. He swept his hand out toward the fields, the distant mountains—the world.

“We farmers sit here every year when the rains fail and say ‘next year.’” He paused, and looked at his father-in-law. “Next year ain’t gonna save us. Nor the one after. This world’s a treasure, Donald. But she’s been telling us to leave for a while now. Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.”

He stopped, feeling somehow a little hollow, even though he believed everything he said. He was right, and Donald would get to that.

So would the kids.

Donald brushed some dust off of the porch rail. He pursed his lips, and now he did seem emotional—uncharacteristically so.

“Tom’ll be okay,” he said, as if reading Cooper’s mind. “But you have to make it right with Murph…”

“I will,” Cooper said, even though he knew it was easier said than done.

“Without making any promises you don’t know you can keep,” Donald finished, looking him directly in the eye.

Cooper looked away, nodding.

Feeling the burden.

Cooper figured he’d let Murph cool down overnight, that she’d be easier to approach after some sleep. But the next morning, the door was still barricaded. He pressed it open gingerly, until he could reach the chair and pull it down from where it was stacked on the desk. Then he pushed it wider and stepped in.

Murph was in her bed, back turned to him.

“You have to talk to me,” he said.

She didn’t respond, and he wondered if she might still be asleep.

“I have to fix this before I go,” he said.

He leaned over her to see her face, and he felt a sort of shock go through him. Her cheeks were still blazing and tear-stained, and he wondered if she’d slept at all.

“Then I’ll keep it broken,” she said stubbornly. “So you have to stay.”

So that’s how it’s gonna be.

Cooper sat on the bed. He had taken Donald’s advice to heart, and had been practicing what to say, staying up half the night. He hadn’t expected Murph to still be this upset, however. In his mind’s-eye rehearsal, he’d been having this conversation with a calmer, quieter daughter.

He still had to give it a go, though, and he thought he knew how to begin.

“After you kids came along,” he told her, “your mother said something I didn’t really understand. She said, ‘I look at the babies and see myself as they’ll remember me.’”

He studied Murph to see if it was sinking in.

At least she appeared to be listening. So he continued.

“She said, ‘It’s as if we don’t exist anymore, like we’re ghosts, like we’re just there to be memories for our kids.’”

He paused again before going on. The expression on Murph’s face was a little puzzled—and he didn’t blame her. It had taken him a while to get it himself.

“Now I realize,” he said, “once we’re parents, we’re just the ghosts of our children’s futures.”

“You said ghosts don’t exist,” Murph replied defiantly.

“That’s right,” Cooper said. “I can’t be your ghost right now—I need to exist. Because they chose me. They chose me, Murph. You saw it.”

Murph sat up and pointed at the shelves, at the gaps between the books.

“I figured out the message,” she said. She opened her notebook. “It was Morse code.”

“Murph…” Cooper said, gently.

She ignored him.

“One word,” she continued. “You know what it is?”

He shook his head. She held out her notebook so he could see it.

“It says ‘stay,’ Dad.” She peered at him, waiting for his response.

“Oh, Murph,” he said, his voice sad.

“You don’t believe me?” she said, her eyes flashing defiantly. “Look at the books. Look at—”

He reached out and took her in his arms, stopping her from saying anymore. She felt so little, and she was trembling.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “It’s okay.”

She pressed her face into his shoulder, sobbing.

“Murph,” he said, “a father looks in his child’s eyes and thinks, ‘Maybe it’s them. Maybe my child will save the world.’ And everyone, once a child, wants to look into their own dad’s eyes and know he saw they saved some little corner of the world. But usually, by then, the father is gone.”

“Like you will be,” she said, and she sniffed. Cooper gazed at his daughter, at the fear and pain written on her face.

“No,” he said. “I’m coming back.” Even as he said it, he understood he’d done just what Donald had told him not to. But he had to say something. To get her through it. To get both of them through it.

To give her hope.

Yet he dreaded her next question.

“When?” she asked.

Murph took little for granted. He knew that, so he was prepared. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two wristwatches.

“One for you,” he said, and then pointed to the watch on his wrist. “One for me.”

She took the watch, turning it in her hand, examining it curiously.

“When I’m in hypersleep,” he explained, “or travel near the speed of light, or near a black hole, time will change for me. It’ll run more slowly.”

Murph frowned slightly.

“When I get back we can compare,” he said, then he waited.

He could almost see her brain working through it.

“Time will run differently for us?” she said. There was a hint of wonderment in her tone, and he felt a little flush of relief. If she could see this as an adventure, her adventure as well as his, and understand his promise…

“Yup,” he told her. “By the time I get back we might be the same age. You and me. Imagine that.”

He watched as her face changed, and he knew he’d made a mistake, said perhaps exactly the wrong thing.

“Wait, Murph—”

“You have no idea when you’re coming back,” she said angrily.

He gave her a pleading look. He needed something to say, but this was off his script.

“No idea at all!” she shouted, and she slung the watch across the room before turning her back on him again.

So quickly, what little momentum he’d had—or maybe just imagined he had—was gone. His plan, such as it was, was suddenly was in tatters, and there wasn’t any time to start over, even if he knew how.

“Don’t make me leave like this,” Cooper pleaded.

But her back stayed to him.

“Please,” he said. “I have to go now.” He reached to put his hand on her shoulder, but she angrily shook it off.

“I love you, Murph,” he said, finally. “Forever. And I’m coming back.”

Slowly he stood up. Everything about him felt heavy. He knew if he stayed another minute, another hour, another day, it would be the same. Either he was going, or he wasn’t. Murph would be okay, and in time she would understand.

As he reached the threshold, he heard a thunk behind him. He turned, but Murph was still facing away from him. A newly fallen book lay on the floor. He looked at it for a moment, wondering.

Then, reluctantly, he stepped out of Murph’s room.

Donald and Tom met him at the car.

“How’d it go?” Donald asked.

“Fine,” Cooper lied. “It was fine.”

He turned to Tom and wrapped him up in a tight hug.

“I love you, Tom,” he said.

“Travel safe, Dad,” his son replied.

“Look after the place, you hear?” he said, feeling a hitch in his voice.

“Can I use your truck while you’re gone?” Tom asked.

Cooper managed a smile. That was Tom. Practical. Pragmatic. And eager to get his hands on the wheel.

“I’ll make sure they bring it back for you,” he promised. Then, not wanting to linger, he got in the truck and started the engine.

“Mind my kids for me, Donald,” he said.

The old man nodded as he pulled out.

Back in the house, Murph heard the car start. Her anger broke in an instant, dissolving into anguish.

She’d thought he would come back, that he was bluffing. She jumped off the bed, grabbed the watch and ran for the stairs. She had to tell him, had to really say goodbye, to hug him one last time.

Cooper watched the house dwindle in the rearview mirror. Even now, so much of him wanted to turn back, to be with his children. If only Murph…

A thought occurred to him, and he reached back into the wheel well and pulled up the blanket from where she had hidden last time, but now it was empty. He’d known it would be, yet part of him had needed to know.

So he fixed his mind on the Rangers, perched atop their boosters, waiting for him.

And then on the countdown.

Ten, nine…

Murph nearly tripped on the stairs, but then she flew across the kitchen and burst through the door, out onto the porch.

“Dad? Dad!” she yelled desperately.

Eight, seven…

All she could see was a dust trail, leading away toward the mountains, as it had before. But this time she wasn’t hiding under the blanket. She wasn’t in the truck.

Six, five…

Great sobs started tearing from her chest as Grandpa took her in his arms, and the trail of dust grew more distant. She gripped the watch in her hand as she cried, willing him to keep his promise, to come back.

Cooper looked once more in the rearview mirror, but all he could see was dust. He felt tears rolling down his cheeks.

Four, three, two…

One.