Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization (3 page)

“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.