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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