Greg Keyes - Interstellar

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.