Interstellar

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.

EIGHT

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.

A few minutes later, satisfied with his loading, Cooper went back into the house for the maps and some bottled water. He hesitated a moment, looking up the stairs to where Murph was probably sulking in her room.

“Murph!” he called, but she didn’t answer. Which wasn’t surprising. He wondered if he should go up and talk to her, but he felt like it would just be a waste of time.

“Murph, just wait here for Grandpa,” he yelled up. “Tell him I’ll call him on the radio.”

Then he went back through the door, climbed into his truck, and headed out.

Toward what? His daughter had a gravitational anomaly in her bedroom. Well, there were gravitational anomalies all around the world—plenty of them if you weren’t too picky by what you meant. Gravity and mass were intimately linked—the more massive something was, the more it bent space-time, the more it attracted other bodies.