Interstellar

* * *

Donald offered him a beer. Cooper took it, and gazed aimlessly off toward the dark fields, the old man sitting there beside him in a chair that was probably as old as he was.

“Had to reset every compass clock and GPS to offset for the anomaly,” Cooper said.

“Which is?” Donald asked.

Cooper took a swig of the beer. It was cold, and it felt good in his throat, but for him it would never quite taste right. Beer was supposed to be made of barley. Not corn. But barley was sleeping with the dinosaurs now, courtesy of the blight.

“No idea,” he said, finally admitting that for all of his apparently outdated training and knowledge, he didn’t have an explanation any more scientific than his daughter’s ghost. “If the house was built on magnetic ore, we’d’ve seen this the first time we switched on a tractor.”

Donald nodded and sipped his own drink. He didn’t press it any further. Instead he changed to an even less pleasant subject.

“Sounds like your meeting at school didn’t go so well.”

Cooper sighed, thinking back to the encounter, trying to pinpoint exactly what it was that had left him feeling so angry. Was it the lie about Apollo?

Partly. But that was just part of something bigger.

“We’ve forgotten who we are, Donald,” he said. “Explorers. Pioneers. Not caretakers.”

Donald nodded thoughtfully. Cooper waited, knowing Donald would take his time if he thought he had something important to say—weigh up his words like kilos of corn before broadcasting the least of them.

“When I was a kid,” he finally said, “it felt like they made something new every day. Some gadget or idea. Like every day was Christmas. But six billion people…” He shook his head. “Just try to imagine that. And every last one of them trying to have it all.” He shifted to face Cooper directly. “This world isn’t so bad. Tom’ll do just fine—you’re the one who doesn’t belong. Born forty years too late, and forty years too early. My daughter knew it, God bless her. And your kids know it.

“’Specially Murph,” he added.

Cooper turned his gaze skyward, where the stars were showing them something that didn’t happen that much anymore. A show worth staying up for. He could pick out the Seven Sisters and Orion’s belt and the dim, faintly red orb of Mars. Humanity had been headed there, once. He had been headed there, or at least that had been the general idea.

“We used to look up and wonder at our place in the stars,” he said. “Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

Donald’s expression was sympathetic.

“Cooper,” he said, “you were good at something, and you never got a chance to do anything with it. I’m sorry. But that’s not your kids’ fault.”

Cooper knew he didn’t have anything to say to that, so he didn’t even try. He just continued watching the slow wheel of the night sky, the thousands of stars he could see, the trillions he couldn’t due to atmosphere and distance. Men and women had been out there. Men had gone to the moon, and no rewriting of any textbook would ever change that reality.

No matter how inconvenient a fact it might be for the caretakers.

SIX

Something in the face of the old man shifts. His eyes are looking at something we cannot see. Should not see.

“May 14th,” he says. “Never forget. Clear as a bell. You’d never think…”

Another man’s face, also old, and his expression is close kin to that of the first.

“When the first of the real big ones rolled in,” he says, “I thought it was the end of the world.”

* * *

The crack of the bat brought Cooper’s wandering mind back to the game, at least for a moment.

He watched the ball shoot up, like a rocket determined to break through the stratosphere, only to slow, briefly stop, and arc sharply back down to the mitt waiting to catch it. He gazed around at the half-filled stands, where a smattering of applause didn’t seem to really add up to enthusiasm.

“In my day we had real ball players,” Donald complained. “Who’re these bums?”

The pop fly was the third out, and the team on the field started in—“New York Yankees” printed plainly on their uniforms.

“Well, in my day people were too busy fighting over food for baseball,” Cooper reminded him, “so consider this progress.”

Murph reached a bag of popcorn toward Donald.

“Fine,” the old man grumbled, looking at the bag as if it might contain manure. “But popcorn at a ball game is unnatural. I want a hot dog.”

Cooper watched his daughter’s face frame her confusion.

“What’s a hot dog?” she asked.