Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization by Greg Keyes Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    “Blight,” the professor said. “Wheat seven years ago, okra this year. Now there’s just corn.”
    Something about that stung a little. He was, after all, a farmer.
    “But we’re growing more now than ever,” he protested.
    “Like the potatoes in Ireland, like the wheat in the dust bowl, the corn will die,” Professor Brand said. “Soon.”
    Behind them, the young Dr. Brand entered with Murph, who looked around in undisguised awe. Cooper had seen places like this, albeit long ago. Murph had never seen anything of the kind.
    She also looked bleary-eyed.
    “Murph is a little tired,” the younger Brand said. “I’m taking her to my office for a nap.”
    Cooper nodded, a little relieved. This was probably a conversation his daughter did not need to hear.
    “We’ll find a way,” Cooper objected, once she was out of earshot. “We always have.”
    “Driven by the unshakable faith that the Earth is ours,” Professor Brand added, a bit sarcastically.
    “Not just ours,” Cooper said. “But it is our home.”
    The professor regarded him coolly.
    “Earth’s atmosphere is 80 percent nitrogen,” he pointed out. “We don’t even breathe nitrogen.” He pointed to a stalk of corn. The leaves were blotched and striped with grey, which along with the ashen, tumescent blobs of infected kernels were the telltale signs of infection.
    “Blight does,” the professor continued. “And as it thrives, our air contains less and less oxygen.” He gestured toward Murph. “The last people to starve will be the first to suffocate. Your daughter’s generation will be the last to survive on Earth.”
    Cooper stared at him. He wanted to continue to protest, to advocate for hope. New strains of corn could be bred. The answer to the blight might come the day after tomorrow. Human beings were resourceful—it was their hallmark as a race.
    But in the pith of him, he knew that everything Professor Brand was saying was true. Unbidden, he experienced an image of Murph, gasping for breath, her eyes, mouth and nostrils caked with dust…
    He turned to the professor.
    “Tell me this is where you explain how you’re going to save the world,” he said.
    * * *
    Their next stop was another room, this one on a scale that dwarfed even the last. But this time he knew instantly what he was seeing, and it brought long-buried feelings rushing back, hard.
    It was a multi-stage rocket—a big one—contained in a vastly larger cylindrical chamber. In fact, the launch chamber seemed far larger than necessary, by several orders of magnitude. He felt like an ant in a grain silo. High, high above, light shone, this time unmistakably that of the sun,