Interstellar

“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.