Interstellar, page 3
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.
