Interstellar

“You’re telling me,” Cooper plowed on, “you need two numbers to measure your own ass, but just one to measure my son’s future?”

Miss Hanley stifled a laugh. So she had a sense of humor, too. That was okay. But she looked rebuffed when the principal shot her a nasty look before putting his game face back on.

“You’re a well-educated man, Coop,” he said, trying to regain the upper hand. “A trained pilot—”

“And an engineer,” Cooper put in, not willing to be shortchanged by this condescending pri… principal.

“Okay,” Okafor said, leaning forward. “Well, right now the world doesn’t need more engineers. We didn’t run out of planes, or television sets. We ran out of food.”

Cooper sat back in the chair, feeling the steam leak out of him.

“The world needs farmers,” Okafor continued, with a smile that was probably meant to be benign but just felt patronizing. “Good farmers, like you. And Tom. We’re a caretaker generation. And things are getting better. Maybe your grandchildren—”

Cooper suddenly just wanted to be very far from this man, this conversation, this situation—all of it.

“Are we done, sir?” he asked abruptly.

But it wasn’t going to be that easy. Nothing ever was.

“No,” the principal said. “Miss Hanley is here to talk about Murph.”

Reluctantly, Cooper shifted his gaze to Miss Hanley. What was coming next? Were they going to tell him that Murph wasn’t sixth-grade material? Because if that was the case, there were some modifications he could make to his combines.

They could make a real mess of this place.

“Murph’s a bright kid,” she began, dispelling that worry, but raining a metric ton of others. “A wonderful kid, Mr. Cooper. But she’s been having a little trouble…”

Here we go, Cooper thought. The “but.”

Miss Hanley placed a textbook on the desk.

“She brought this to school,” she said. “To show the other kids the section on lunar landings…”

“Yeah,” he said, recognizing it. “It’s one of my old textbooks. She likes the pictures.”

“This is an old federal textbook,” Miss Hanley said. “We’ve replaced them with corrected versions.”

“Corrected?” Cooper asked.

“Explaining how the Apollo missions were faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union.”

He was so stunned that for a moment he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to react.

Laugh? Cry?

Explode?

He settled for incredulity.

“You don’t believe we went to the moon?” Sure, he was aware that there had always been a fringe element—crazies who held to that cock-eyed nonsense. But a teacher? How could anyone with half a mind peddle that baloney?

She smiled at him as if he were a three-year-old.

“I believe it was a brilliant piece of propaganda,” she allowed. “The Soviets bankrupted themselves pouring resources into rockets and other useless machines.”

“Useless machines?” Cooper asked, feeling his fuse grow shorter.

Of course, she kept going.

“Yes, Mr. Cooper,” she said, tolerantly. “And if we don’t want to repeat the wastefulness of the twentieth century, our children need to learn about this planet. Not tales of leaving it.”

Cooper tried to absorb that for a moment. His fuse was still burning, flaring even, sputtering toward the keg.

“One of those useless machines they used to make,” he finally began, “was called an MRI. And if we had any of them left, the doctors would have been able to find the cyst in my wife’s brain before she died, rather than afterwards. Then she would be sitting here listening to this, which’d be good, ’cos she was always the calmer one…”

Miss Hanley looked first confused, then embarrassed, then a little aghast, but before she could say anything, Okafor broke in.

“I’m sorry about your wife, Mr. Cooper,” he said. “But Murph got into a fistfight with several of her classmates over this Apollo nonsense, and we thought it best to bring you in and see what ideas you might have for dealing with her behavior on the home front.” With that, he stopped and waited.

Cooper regarded the two of them for a moment, thinking how unreal it was, how everything seemed sort of normal sometimes, and then you realized how upside down things had actually turned.

Am I that out of touch? he wondered. Has it really gotten that bad?

He guessed he was, and that it had. He didn’t pay much attention to what little news there was, because he had long ago realized it was really mostly propaganda. But he hadn’t realized they had gone so far as to rewrite the freaking textbooks.

Principal Okafor and Miss Hanley were waiting expectantly. They wanted to know how he was going to punish Murph for her temerity. How he was going to straighten her out.

They deserved an answer.

“Sure,” he said, finally, carefully measuring out his words. “Well, there’s a ball game tomorrow night, and Murph’s going through a bit of a baseball phase. There’ll be candy and soda…”