Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization (6 page)

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…