Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization (5 page)

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.