Interstellar

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 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 had been peeling off from the fields and heading over," Boots said.

Cooper walked over to the autopilot that worked the controls,

"Something's interfering with their compass," Boots wen 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 thee 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 it 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 yo 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 right 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 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 a 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 importantly to say - weight 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 everyday. 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 it 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 somethings 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 continue watching the slow wheel of night sky, thousands of stars he could see, the trillions he couldn't due to the 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.