Greg Keyes - Interstellar

“Wait!” he cried, following her.

When he got to her room she was just standing there, staring at the floor, with the window still wide open. The rush and howl of the storm were fighting their way into the room. Suppressing some inelegant turns of phrase, he crossed the floor, gripped the wooden frame, and slammed it shut, instantly distancing the sounds.

Bereft of wind, the dust hung in the air, as fine and insidious as powdered graphite.

Murph just stood there, gawking at the floor, her eyes wide as dinner plates. And then Cooper saw why. Streaks were forming in the suspended dust, as if a giant invisible comb was being pulled through the air from floor to ceiling. Then he realized the dust was actually streaming down with unnatural speed, collecting on the floor; not randomly, but into lines—lines that formed into a distinguishable pattern.

“The ghost,” Murph said.

The ghost. Cooper didn’t bother to contradict her this time. He was too busy staring himself.

The dust was collecting as if it were falling on wires, but there were no wires to see. He was reminded of a very old toy which had been his uncle’s when he was a boy. Basically it consisted of a piece of cardboard with a human face drawn on it, covered by a flat plastic bubble. There were finely cut iron filings inside of the bubble. The toy came with a pencil-shaped magnet, and if you held the magnet behind the cardboard, you could drag the filings around to form hair and a beard on the face.

From the front it appeared as if an unseen force was dragging the filings into shape. Which of course was the case, since a magnetic field is invisible to the human eye. Yet the source of that little trick—the magnetic field—the magnet—could easily be discovered by any observer who looked behind the cardboard.

Not so, what was happening before his eyes.

Dust wasn’t metal. It wasn’t attracted by magnetic fields. And below the pattern there was only floor; no hand—human or otherwise—was wielding a hidden magnet. Yet undeniably, something was attracting the dust, and not randomly.

Someone was behind the cardboard with… something.

He felt a little prickle on the back of his spine. The drone. The harvesters.

Now this.

“Grab your pillow,” he told Murph. “Sleep in with Tom.”

She went, but with considerable hesitation.

Murph woke the next morning, trying to figure out what was wrong. Where she was. She certainly wasn’t in her room, but in a far smellier place.

Then the pile of covers on the bed snorted and she got it—she was in Tom’s room, for some reason.

Then she remembered it all. The dust storm, the open window, the ghost tracing lines with the dust. Trying to go to sleep, wanting desperately to see what the ghost had drawn. Then finally sleep, and crazier dreams than she usually had.

Now, at last, morning had come.

It was cold, so she wrapped herself in a blanket before leaving Tom’s room and padding down the hall to her own, worried there wouldn’t be anything—just a pile of dust. Just another thing for her dad to dismiss as nothing. As her imagination.

He was always ready to get into a fight when other people didn’t take her seriously—like at the school yesterday. But when it came down to it, he was the worst one of all.

So she went on to her room, braced for disappointment.

But when she walked quietly through the doorway, her dad was there already, and she realized with a shock that he might have been there all night.

The dust had settled now, leaving a thin mantel throughout the house, on everything. It all would need cleaning soon.

Except here, in her room.

Her dad was staring at a pattern of lines in the dust—some thick, some thinner. It reminded her of her drawing from the day before.

Murph sat down next to her dad. He didn’t say anything at first—just held up a coin.

“It’s not a ghost,” he said.

Then he tossed the coin across the pattern. The second it crossed a line, it turned and shot straight down to the floor.

“It’s gravity.”

Donald wearily traversed the stairs, where he found Cooper and Murph in Erin’s… Murph’s room, still studying the dust on the floor. They had been there all morning—probably all night, as well.

Neither of them looked up when he came in.

“I’m dropping Tom,” Donald informed him, “then heading to town.” He glanced down at the pattern on the floor, at the little science-fair project with which Cooper and Murph were both obsessed.

“You wanna clean that up when you’ve finished praying to it?” he gruffed.

No answer.

All right then…

As he left, Cooper wordlessly took Murph’s notebook from her hands and started scribbling in it.

After Grandpa and Tom left, Murph spent a lot of time thinking about her ghost, and what it was trying to tell her.

She was glad Dad was finally paying attention to the strange things that had been happening in her room, but in a way she was starting to feel a little vexed. This was her investigation, wasn’t it? He had told her that himself, challenged her to make it all scientific. Well, she’d taken him at his word, and still he hadn’t taken her seriously.

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.

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.