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.
But anomalies didn’t tend to pop up in the course of a day, in a tiny spot in someone’s house, someone’s bedroom. And they didn’t usually present patterns that turned out to be map coordinates, translated into binary code. Coordinates to a place that was relatively nearby.
He spread the map across the steering wheel and looked around for a pen. There wasn’t one in the passenger seat, or the glove compartment, so he reached down to the passenger-side leg space, where a blanket covered a clutter of stuff. He lifted up the blanket.
A grinning face suddenly appeared, framed in red hair.
“Jesus!” he yelped, his hand snapping back in surprise.
Laughing—laughing—Murph climbed up into the shotgun seat.
“It’s not funny,” he began, but she just kept cackling. He started to scold her again, then he chuckled.
Then he laughed, too.
“You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me,” she pointed out, after her giggles died down.
It felt good, he realized. Laughing with her. Sharing this with her.
He still didn’t like putting her in danger, but this might be a good thing in the long run, this little road trip together.
Cooper handed her the map.
“Fair enough,” he said, suppressing one last chuckle. “Make yourself useful.”
Up ahead, far across the plain, the mountains lay slumped on the horizon—and somewhere among those peaks, they would find their destination. He figured they’d be there by dark.
Murph fell asleep a little before they entered the foothills. He glanced at her in the light of dusk, at the features that so oddly mingled his with her mother’s. He wondered, briefly, who she would become, who she would be.
Not a farmer, he was sure of that. Not a farmer’s wife. Not even in this “caretaker” world of theirs, where people gradually got used to fewer and fewer choices, until there were none at all.
He shifted his attention again to the dark foothills, his mind turning back to the binary code that had infested his house. Did it really make sense? Was he reading meaning into a random pattern?
How could anyone refuse to believe mankind had gone to the moon?
He didn’t blame Murph for taking a poke at those kids.
Cooper took a turn, and then another, winding his way along a narrow road. They were in a mountain pass as night fell complete, and his old friends the stars began looking down through the thinner air of the mountains. Then he felt a yearning that he almost thought he’d forgotten. He felt as if he had somehow left the world he knew, heading for an earlier, younger one. In the dark, with mountains all around and no corn anywhere to be seen, it might have been twenty years ago, or more.
It could have been anytime. Except for the girl, sleeping in the passenger’s seat. Time’s arrow made visible.
He was still considering the tyranny of entropy when he arrived at the coordinates. He was there—or as near there as he could get with a chain-link fence in his way.
He stared at it for a moment, wondering why this place, why here? He didn’t see anything special beyond the barrier, certainly nothing cosmic enough to warrant a message written in gravity. But this was it—the moment when he would learn whether he was inspired or delusional.
The answer lay just yards away. And it was denied to him by the fence.
His daughter was still asleep.
“Murph,” he said, gently. “Murph.” She opened her eyes and looked groggily around, struggling to sit up.
He nodded at the fence.
“I think this is as far as we get.”
Murph glanced at the fence and then closed her eyes again.
“Why?” she asked sleepily. “You didn’t bring the bolt cutters?”
He felt a smile broaden his face. That was his girl.
“I like your spirit, young lady,” he said.
He exited the cab and got the bolt cutters out of the back, feeling the palm-slicked wood of the handles, cool to the touch. He looked either way, up and down the road, but there was no light, no sound, only the quiet of a mountain night. He reached out with the cutters, laying their steel jaws to the fence…
Blinding light exploded and he threw his hands up to protect his eyes. A voice boomed, harsh, artificial—electronic.
“Step away from the fence.”
He dropped the cutters and threw his hands up in the air. He still couldn’t see anything but the glare of the spotlights.
“Don’t shoot!” he hollered. “My child is in the car! I’m unarmed! My daughter is—”
From the car, Murph heard a sharp snapping sound and instantly sat upright. She saw a flash of actinic blue light as her father jerked, and then dropped like a sack of grain. She felt the car tremble and heard the thud of massive footfalls as she scrambled back in the seat, trying to think—trying not to think about what had just happened to her dad…
The door was suddenly yanked open, and blinding light poured in.