Interstellar

A look of approval had begun to appear on Miss Hanley’s face. He remembered Donald’s words again. But even if he were anywhere near to being in the market for another wife, no amount of looks could make up for this amount of stupid. He regarded her bluntly.

“I think I’ll take her to that,” he told her.

She blinked as if she didn’t understand, then turned to Okafor, a very unhappy expression starting upon her pretty features.

The principal didn’t look so happy himself.

* * *

“How’d it go?” Murph asked a few minutes later, as he approached the pickup.

“I, uh… got you suspended,” he admitted.

“What?” she gasped.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“Dad!” she said, her voice rising. “I told you not to—”

The CB radio in the truck suddenly squawked to life.

“Cooper?” it crackled. “Boots for Cooper.”

With a certain amount of relief, he brushed past his distressed daughter and picked up the handset, holding it close alongside his mouth.

“Cooper,” he replied.

“Coop, those combines you rebuilt went haywire,” Boots asserted. He sounded a little excited, which was unusual. Boots had been Cooper’s chief farmhand for half a decade, but he’d been farming since childhood, and had pretty much seen it all.

“Power the controllers down for a few minutes,” Cooper said, still aware of Murph’s expression of disbelief, and trying to avoid catching her eye.

“Did that,” Boots replied. “You should come take a look, it’s kinda weird.”

FIVE

Kinda weird? Cooper thought as they passed the enormous boxy harvester that was pulling up to the house. How about, “Freakin’ weird?”

The harvester wasn’t alone. Dozens of automated farming machines had arrived in his front yard and stopped, nudged up to his porch as if they were waiting to be let in. It reminded Cooper of a nativity scene, with the machines playing the parts of the animals.

As he and Murph got out of the truck to more fully appreciate the bizarre tableau, Boots arrived. His white hair marked him as a bit older than Cooper. He was no great thinker, but he knew farming as well as anyone.

“One by one they been peeling off from the fields and heading over,” Boots said.

Cooper walked over to the harvester, opened up the cabin, and had a look at the autopilot that worked the controls.

“Something’s interfering with their compass,” Boots went on. “Magnetism or some such…”

That much was obvious, Cooper thought. But what was there in the house that could exert that sort of magnetic force? He thought about the drone, which also had been called by something unknown—if not to his house, then at least to the same general area. What were the odds of both things happening in the same day?

They seemed pretty low.

He wheeled and strode toward the house, not at all sure what he was looking for. Whatever it was, though, he was damned determined that he was gonna find it.

He didn’t see anything in the kitchen, though. Murph walked in behind him.

“What is it, Dad?”

Before he could answer, there was a pronounced—if not particularly loud—thump from upstairs. Cooper moved quickly to the stairs, then climbed them warily, all sorts of thoughts scurrying through his mind.

Maybe someone else had been trying to hijack the drone, and now they were screwing with his machines, invading his house?

Maybe it was something else—another drone, crashed into the upstairs, calling desperately for its winged comrade in some command code that was affecting the farm equipment.

He was certain now, in his mind, that it couldn’t have been a coincidence—the drone, the way the harvesters were acting. There had to be a connection.

Damned if I can figure out what it can be, though… He hesitated slightly at the threshold to Murph’s bedroom. The door was open, and he could see inside.

One entire wall was a bookshelf, floor to ceiling. Most of the books they contained had once belonged to his wife, Erin, just as the room itself had been hers when she was a girl. Long before they had married.

Now it was Murph’s room.

He noticed there were now gaps in what had once been overstuffed bookshelves. The missing books were on the floor. Suddenly he remembered Murph’s comments, earlier in the day.

“Nothing special about which books,” Murph said, moving into the room from behind him. “Been working on it, like you said.” She held up the notebook in which she’d been drawing. The page was covered by a pattern that looked something like a barcode.

“I counted the spaces,” she said, as if that explained it all.

“Why?” Cooper asked.

“In case the ghost is trying to say something,” she explained. “I’m trying Morse.”

“Morse?” he said.

“Yeah, dots and dashes, used for—”

“Murph,” he said, trying to be gentle. “I know what Morse code is. I just don’t think your bookshelf’s trying to talk to you.”

She looked at him with a mixture of hurt and embarrassment. But she didn’t even try to reply.