Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization

THIRTEEN

“Ignition!” the flight controller said.

For an instant, Cooper thought that nothing was going to happen, that from the start it had all been some sort of weird hoax or delusion. But then he felt the vibration, the shudder that ran through the whole metal skin of the ship—awful and slow at first, like a titan stirring, but then gathering speed at a dreadful pace.

Then the light was changing, growing brighter, the sky getting closer as a huge invisible hand pressed down on him, harder and harder.

Gagarin, he thought, Shepard, Grissom, Titov, Glenn, Carpenter, Nikolayev…

The bright day was already fading as the horizon appeared in his vision. There was a sudden, gut-wrenching lurch, as the hand pressing him down came off for an instant, and his body pulled forward.

Then the G-force slammed him back into his crash couch.

“Stage one, separation,” he heard control say. He tried to imagine the huge booster dropping away, but it was hard to think of anything but the force pinning him down, the barely controlled bomb that lay behind him, hurling him toward the stars.

White, Chaffee, Komarov…

The horizon began to curve in earnest. The ship was no longer shuddering, although it was still humming with acceleration. He couldn’t move. He felt as if he weighed a thousand pounds, as if the next time he exhaled he would not be able to inhale again, and he would suffocate in his crash couch.

Then he felt suddenly as if he was falling—almost like he had been hurled from a plane—and then he weighed nothing at all.

“Stage two, separation,” control said.

Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin…

Skip ahead, he thought.

Cooper.

Because finally, incredibly—he was in space.

As soon as he could move again, he glanced around the cramped cabin at his companions to see how they were handling things. Dr. Brand, Doyle, and Romilly looked like he probably did—a little dazed.

“All here, Mr. Cooper,” the fifth member of the crew assured him. TARS, the robot who had zapped him at the fence. “Plenty of slaves for my robot colony.”

Cooper wondered if his ears—or worse, his brain—had been affected by lift-off. His confusion must have been written across his face, because Doyle stepped in.

“They gave him a humor setting,” he explained. “So he’d fit in with his unit better. He thinks it relaxes us.”

“A massive sarcastic robot,” Cooper remarked. “What a good idea.”

“I have a cue light I can turn on when I’m joking, if you like,” TARS offered.

“Probably help,” Cooper said.

“You can use it to find your way back to the ship after I blow you out of the airlock,” TARS said.

TARS “looked” at him, and Cooper looked back. He didn’t see anything that appeared to be a cue light.

The hairs on the back of his neck were beginning to prick up when an LED suddenly flashed on.

Frowning, Cooper shook his head.

“What’s your humor setting, TARS?” he asked.

“One hundred percent,” the machine replied.

Wonderful. How many months was it going to be?

“Take it down to seventy-five, please,” he said, then he turned away, glanced around to assure himself that everyone was still strapped in, and started checking the instruments.

The conjoined Rangers settled into a low orbit, and for a time there was nothing to do but wait.

Nothing wrong with that, he mused. The Ranger had a wide field of vision, giving them all a panoramic view of Earth as it turned below them. Even though he was still strapped into his crash couch, Cooper found himself rubbernecking like a tourist, watching the continents, seas, and clouds—thinking that it all seemed somehow a little unreal. The lift-off, the terrible acceleration, appeared as if long ago and now, as they spent their time in free-fall, everything felt a dream.

The planet—his planet—was as beautiful as it was fragile, and it was the only home humanity had ever known. Viewing it from out here, he found it hard to believe that she didn’t want them anymore.

He noticed that Dr. Brand was also watching the world turn below them, her expression distant.

“We’ll be back,” he told her.

She didn’t show any sign that she’d heard him, didn’t turn away from the view, but continued to stare.

“It’s hard,” he went on. “Leaving everything. My kids, your father…”

“We’re going to be spending a lot of time together,” Brand said, turning her gaze toward him.

Cooper nodded. “We should learn to talk,” he said.

“And when not to,” she replied, looking away again. “Just trying to be honest,” she added.

“Maybe you don’t need to be that honest,” he said, wincing internally. He looked over at TARS. “TARS, what’s your honesty parameter?”

TARS didn’t need a crash couch. He fit into a niche in the center of the control panel, between the manual units.

As Cooper spoke, he unlatched himself and moved toward the rear airlock.

“Ninety percent,” he responded.

“Ninety?” Cooper said. “What kind of robot are you?”

“Absolute honesty isn’t always the most diplomatic—or safe—form of communication with emotional beings,” TARS informed him.

True that, Cooper thought wryly. He turned back to Brand, and shrugged.

“Ninety percent honesty it is, then,” he said.

At first he thought he had bombed again, but then her lips traced a smile on her face. Almost imperceptible, but he was sure it was there.

Progress.

“Sixty seconds out…” The radio crackled.

Cooper decided he’d better quit while he was ahead. Besides, he was about to earn his pay. The first installment, anyway.

So he looked away from the Earth and Brand, and focused his attention on the Endurance, as they approached her. His first impression was of a wedding ring, glittering in the twin lights of the Earth and the sun.

The Rangers were sleek, winged, aerodynamic craft built for landing and taking off from planets that possessed atmospheres. Not so the Endurance—there was nothing aerodynamic about her, and any landing she made on any planet with an atmosphere would be pretty much the same sort of landing as a meteor would make: fast, fiery, and catastrophic.

Yet floating in space—where she had been built—the vessel was a thing of beauty.

She was, indeed, a ring—but only in the most basic sense, and as they drew nearer his original impression faded. He could distinguish that she was formed from a number of boxy, trapezoidal, prism-shaped modules jointed together by curved connectors. The “ring” wasn’t empty either. Access tubes led from the inner surface of the circular body to a central axis where the docking locks lay. Two ships—the landers—were already there. All she needed were the two Rangers. Feeling oddly calm, Cooper maneuvered his Ranger in, matching his velocity to that of the starship.

He’d run through the docking sequence plenty in simulations, but in the back of his mind he’d worried that the real thing would throw him some sort of curve. But he got her lined up with ease, which felt good.

“It’s all you, Doyle,” he said.

Doyle drifted toward the hatch and began the final sequence, which was sort of the tricky part. If he messed this up they would at best lose precious oxygen and at worst—well, he wasn’t sure, but it could be bad. He watched as Doyle lined up a circular array of small grapples and engaged them to bring the two ships together in an airtight seal. Each mechanical claw latched perfectly, as if Doyle had been doing this his whole life.

With that, the Endurance was complete.

Once Amelia Brand’s primate brain stopped screaming that she was falling and needed to grab on to something, zero gravity turned out to be great fun. The slightest push sent her flying around effortlessly in a way she had never imagined—not even in her dreams.

It was almost too bad it had to end.

As they boarded the Endurance, it became clear that it wasn’t as roomy as it looked from the outside. Part of this was because two-thirds of each of the modules was taken up by storage. The floors, the walls—almost every surface was composed of hatches of various sizes. On a deep-space vessel, there could be no wasted space—not even one the size of a matchbox.

Flipping switches and adjusting settings, Amelia, Doyle, and Romilly began powering up what would be their home for—well, who knew how long? She watched TARS activate CASE, an articulated machine like himself, who made up the final member of their crew.

Doyle moved “up” to the cockpit and turned on the command console. Technically, there was no up or down at this point, but soon it would no longer be a technicality, as evinced by the ladder that led from the lower deck up to the command deck.

She watched as Doyle finished linking the on-board systems to the Ranger.

“Cooper, you should have control,” Doyle said.

“Talking fine,” Cooper replied. “Ready to spin?”

Doyle and Romilly strapped in. Amelia followed their lead and took a chair.

“All set,” she replied.

She felt nothing at first, but then the ship began to shake as Cooper fired the Ranger’s thrusters, angled perfectly to set the great wheel turning. As the spin picked up, weight began to return to Amelia’s body, pulling her feet toward the outer rim of the starship. It wasn’t gravity, exactly, but the manifestation of inertia often referred to as centrifugal force. Without it—without some semblance of weight—bad things happened to the human body over time, like bone loss and heart disease.

We’re going to need our bones and our hearts when we reach our destination, she thought.

Unfortunately, spin wasn’t a perfect substitute for gravity, because the inner ear wasn’t entirely fooled by it. It knew they were whirling around due to a little thing called the Coriolis effect.

On Earth the Coriolis effect was a big deal. It drove the climate, creating huge cells of air moving in circles—clockwise in the northern hemisphere, counter-clockwise in the southern. But the Earth was so huge, the human body didn’t notice the spin on a personal level. Yet on a whirling carnival ride it was easy to feel, often with upsetting results.

The Endurance lay somewhere in between those extremes, though leaning toward the carnival ride. Amelia felt it herself, especially when she moved toward the axis, but it didn’t really bother her.

Romilly, on the other hand, already was looking a little green.

“You okay, there?” she asked him.

“Yup.” He practically gurgled as he replied. “Just need a little time—”

“There should be a Dramamine in the hab pod,” she told him. He nodded gratefully, and moved gingerly in that direction.

FOURTEEN

“I miss you already, Amelia,” Professor Brand told his daughter, via the video link. “Be safe. Give my regards to Dr. Mann.”

“I will, Dad,” Amelia said.

“Things look good for your trajectory,” the professor continued. “We’re calculating two years to Saturn.”

“That’s a lot of Dramamine…” Romilly said. He didn’t seem to be getting along with the artificial gravity, yet Cooper hadn’t felt even a twinge of unpleasantness.

Two years, though, he thought. Murph would be twelve, and Tom seventeen. And then another two years back to Earth, so really fourteen and nineteen. Minimum. That was what he was going to miss, if their mission in the wormhole took zero time.

Which it would not.

Still, maybe it wouldn’t take all that long. In theory the trip through the wormhole would take a fraction of the time, relatively speaking. Maybe the closest planet would be the one to pan out. He might yet be home while Murph was still in her teens.

“Keep an eye on my family, sir,” Cooper told Professor Brand. “’Specially Murph. She’s a smart one.”

“We’ll be waiting when you get back,” the scientist promised. “A little older, a little wiser, but happy to see you.”

Cooper prepped the engines as Doyle ran a last series of diagnostics from the cockpit cabin of the Endurance. It was a little roomier than the one in the Ranger, set above the central cabin and reached by the rungs of a short ladder.

Brand and Romilly strapped in, and TARS and CASE likewise secured themselves with metallic clanks.

Cooper gazed down at the Earth once more, Professor Brand’s last words still fresh in his mind.

“Do not go gentle into that good night…”

He checked with Doyle, who nodded an okay. Then, without any ceremony, he fired the thrusters, and the Endurance began its journey out of Earth’s orbit, and toward the stars.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Godspeed, Endurance.”

“So alone,” Cooper said, staring at the diminishing sphere of the Earth. They had all changed into their blue sleep outfits, and had begun setting up the cryo-beds—which looked way too much like fancy coffins for his taste. Brand came to stand next to him.

“We’ve got each other,” she told him. “Dr. Mann had it worse.”

“I meant them,” he said, pointing at Earth. “Look at that perfect planet. We’re not gonna find another one like her.”

“No,” Brand agreed. “This isn’t like looking for a new condo—the human race is going to be adrift, desperate for a rock to cling to while they catch their breaths. We have to find that rock. Our three prospects are at the edge of what might sustain human life.”

She held up her tablet and tapped a blurry image of a dark blue planet. The color made it feel promising almost immediately. Blue was what Earth looked like from way out. Blue could mean water. Of course, Neptune was also blue, and it had an atmosphere of hydrogen, helium, and trace methane—completely inimical to life as they knew it.

“Laura Miller’s first,” Brand said. “She started our biology program.”

The image switched to an even smaller image, faintly red. It reminded him of early photographs of Mars.

“And Wolf Edmunds is here,” she said. And the way she said it, the way his name came off her tongue—Cooper had never heard anything like that in her voice before. As if that red dot was the center of the universe. Suddenly he was curious.

“Who’s Edmunds?” he asked.

“Wolf’s a particle physicist,” she said, and this time he knew he heard it. And the way she smiled…

Interesting…

“None of them had family?” he asked, pressing from the side rather than the back. He didn’t have Brand entirely figured yet, but he’d seen enough to guess that head-on wasn’t the right way to come at her.

“No attachments,” she replied. “My father insisted. They knew the odds against ever seeing another human being. I’m hoping we surprise at least three of them.”

“Tell me about Dr. Mann,” he said.

A new world came up on screen, white and grainy.

“Remarkable,” she said. “The best of us. My father’s protégé. He inspired eleven people to follow him on the loneliest journey in human history.” A different sort of passion flared in her eyes, and he saw some of her father there. “Scientists, explorers,” she said. “That’s what I love. Out there we face great odds. Death. But not evil.”

“Nature can’t be evil?” Cooper said.

“Formidable,” Brand said. “Frightening—not evil. Is a tiger evil because it rips a gazelle to pieces?”

Cooper reflected on that. If you were the gazelle, he mused, it was a moot point what was going on in the tiger’s heart and soul—whether it was evil, or just staying alive. Plenty of human beings had justified immensely evil acts in the name of survival and the “natural order of things.”

“Just what we bring with us then,” he said. He didn’t want to get into a real argument, but stubbornly found himself unwilling to let the point slide past completely.

Apparently she noticed.

“This crew represents the best aspects of humanity,” Brand said, a little testily, but he let it go. Why start the trip with a pointless philosophical argument? They had to live with one another for a long time.

In fact, he realized, what they had—along with Romilly and Doyle—was a lot like a marriage. They had to make it work, and they didn’t have the recourse of separation or divorce if things started to get unpleasant. Friction had to be kept at a minimum.

“Even me?” Cooper asked, trying to lighten things back up.

Brand smiled.

“Hey, we agreed,” she said. “Ninety percent.” With that she went to her own cryo-bed. Cooper returned his gaze to the infinite space outside of the ship.

“Don’t stay up too late,” Brand instructed. “We can’t spare the resources.”

“Hey,” Cooper objected with mock chagrin. “I’ve been waiting a long time to be up here.”

“You are literally wasting your breath,” she said. She got into the bed and lay down. The lid slid shut over her, encasing her in a plastic sheath. Liquid began filling in around the plastic, where it would freeze into a shield that would help protect her from the two years’ worth of radiation that would sleet through the hull as she slept.

Sweet dreams, he wished her, and wondered if one did in fact dream in cryo-sleep.

Cooper turned away and went to join TARS.

“Show me the trajectory again,” he told the machine. A diagram appeared on the screen.

“Eight months to Mars,” TARS said, “just like the last time we talked about it. Then counter-orbital slingshot around—”

Cooper saw Brand’s bed darken, then begin withdrawing into the deck.

“TARS,” he interrupted, speaking in a whisper. After all, he’d seen the trajectory so often he could draw it blindfolded. He didn’t need a bedtime review. But there was something about the… social situation on board, and a bit of pertinent information he needed to figure out.

Purely for sociological reasons.

“TARS,” he began, “was Dr. Brand—”

“Why are you whispering?” TARS asked. “You can’t wake them.”

He had been whispering, hadn’t he? Why? He knew TARS was right.

Was he embarrassed?

Nah, he decided. Just being considerate. And this might be important.

Later.

“Were Dr. Brand and Edmunds… close?” he asked carefully.

“I wouldn’t know,” TARS replied.

“Is that ninety percent, or ten percent ‘wouldn’t know?’” Cooper pursued.

“I also have a discretion setting,” the robot informed him.

“So I gather,” Cooper replied. He stood up. “But not a poker face.”

With that he dragged himself reluctantly to the comm station. Everyone else had recorded their goodbyes, but he still didn’t know what he was going to say, how he was going to say it. And probably, he had to admit, that was because there was no right thing to say.

Yet he had to say something. So after a few moments of hemming and hawing, he tapped the control.

“Hey, guys,” he finally began. “I’m about to settle down for a long nap, so I figured I’d send you an update.” He looked again at the dwindling jewel of the planet, apparently spinning due to the Endurance’s rotation.

“The Earth looks amazing from here. You can’t see any of the dust. I hope you guys are doing great. This should get to you okay. Professor Brand said he’d make sure of it.” He paused, aching to say more, something that could wipe away his farewell to Murph, and make everything okay.

But he couldn’t come up with anything.

“Guess I’ll say goodnight,” he finished instead.

FIFTEEN

Donald sat on the porch looking out over the cornfields. Dust and heat made the horizon shimmer—which wasn’t unusual—but between there and him, something else was coming. In time he saw it was a pair of vehicles.

One of them was Cooper’s truck. He hoped…

Then he sighed as the door burst open, and Murph came running out. Of course she had seen them coming. The way she stayed at that window…

“Is it him?” she asked softly.

“I don’t think so, Murph,” he replied. He could have answered unconditionally, but chose not to. Coop had left her in tears. That had been the hard part for him, leaving his daughter while she was so upset. Yet Donald had known when his son-in-law had left that if he didn’t turn around in the first five minutes, he was never coming back. But he hadn’t, and he wasn’t. That Murph still hoped showed that she didn’t understand her father as well as Donald did.

He stood up to meet the truck as it pulled up to the house. A man with a decade or so more years than Donald stepped out. He had a look about him, and Donald guessed it was probably the Professor Brand fellow Coop had mentioned.

“You must be Donald,” the man said. Then he looked at the girl. “Hello, Murph.”

“Why’re you in my dad’s truck?” she demanded.

“He wanted me to bring it for your brother,” the man explained.

Murph didn’t reply, and after an awkward silence, the man reached for a briefcase.

“He sent you a message—”

But Murph wasn’t having any of that, Donald knew. She spun on her heel and bolted back into the house.

The man hesitated for a moment, then pulled out a disk. He held it out toward Donald, who took it.

“Pretty upset with him for leaving,” Donald explained. It was an understatement, but there was no point in being particular, not with these people, this guy.

“If you record messages,” the man said, “I’ll transmit them to Cooper.”

Donald nodded, looking up at the house, thinking that Murph would never do it. He’d bet the farm on it.

“Murph’s a bright spark,” the man said, following his gaze. “Maybe I could fan the flame.”

Donald looked at him, gauged the man’s expression, and saw that he was serious. He had something in mind. Then he thought about Murph, still in school, becoming angrier and more belligerent—until she got expelled.

And then what?

“She’s already making fools out of her teachers,” Donald said. “She should come make a fool out of you.”

The man grinned. Donald liked that.

He looked up into the sky.

“Where are they?” he asked.

“Heading toward Mars,” the man replied. “The next time we hear from Cooper, they’ll be coming up on Saturn.”

Donald nodded.

Godspeed, Coop, he thought. Hope you find what you’re looking for. I hope it’s worth it. Worth what you left.

Murph might see Cooper again. Donald was pretty sure he never would.

He sighed. He’d already done the father thing, hadn’t he? Put in his time?

He was tired.

Count your blessings, old man, he thought to himself. Some men never even live to see their grandchildren. There was so little left that had any value to him. Only Murph and Tom, really. What did he have to complain about?

He would rest when he was dead.

SIXTEEN

Mars had been an object of fascination from the earliest days of modern astronomy, in part because it seemed so Earthlike.

Whole civilizations had risen on the red planet—in the imaginations of Lowell, Wells, Weinbaum, Burroughs, and so many other famous authors. Those civilizations had all fallen when the first robotic landers reported the dull truth. If Mars had ever been a place habitable by human beings—or anything like them—it had been a very long time ago. And if there was life there now, it was hiding itself very, very well.

Which is why they had left it behind. Mars wasn’t going to be humanity’s new home, any more than the Moon was.

Saturn had held the attention and wonder of the world for centuries, as well, but while Mars had done so because it was so Earthlike, Saturn caught the eye because it was so incredibly weird. In movies, in fiction, if you wanted to make clear a planet was really alien, you put rings around it. It was huge, as well, with an atmosphere of mostly hydrogen and helium and clouds of ammonia crystals. No home for humanity there, either, but beauty in plenty, with those bands of ice glittering in the cold light of a distant sun.

Cooper checked his instruments. Dropping into orbit, the Endurance became newest of more than one hundred and fifty moons that circled the gas giant—and that wasn’t counting the trillions of ice gems that made up the rings.

Or the object of their mission.

He checked the controls again and then went to the comm booth.

Two years.

He wanted to see his kids.

“…but they said I can start advanced agriculture a year early,” Tom said, as Cooper sat in the comm booth. He was listening, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

It was weird watching him change. Several recordings had been sent, the first just after Cooper went into cryosleep, and the most recent just a few days ago. They were so far away from Earth now that it took around eighty-four minutes for light—or a radio wave—to make the trip, making real-time conversations impossible, since that would mean a lag of nearly three hours between, “Hi, how are you?” and, “I’m good, how about you?”

In space, distance was time, and time was distance.

Tom mostly talked about the farm. He’d had a little trouble with Boots taking him seriously, but Donald had helped him iron that out. He’d met a girl, but that only lasted a few months. Cooper wasn’t surprised—he remembered the girl, an only child and a bit of a spoiled princess. Not that people couldn’t change, but sometimes there was a whole lot of inertia to overcome if that was to happen.

Tom had managed to repurpose the drone, which was good, because soon after Cooper left, the farm had lost a third of its solar panels in a black blizzard that had lasted almost thirty hours straight. The good news—according to his son—was that the government considered the storm to be a turning point. From here on out, they claimed, the environment would get better.

He wasn’t sure he believed it, but hope was hope.

By the last message, there was a lot less boy in Tom and a lot more man. Donald had been right about him. He was doing fine. Better than fine—he was thriving on the responsibility. Making the farm his farm.

“Got to go, Dad,” his son finished up. “Hope you’re safe up there.” He shuffled aside and Donald appeared, a little more grey, looking a little more weary. Cooper felt a twinge of guilt at having left him to shoulder so much.

“I’m sorry, Coop,” he said, as he had in all of the messages. “I asked Murph to say hi, but she’s as stubborn as her old man. I’ll try again next time. Stay safe.”

That was the end of it. He wondered what Murph looked like now, how twelve would lay differently from ten on her face. Would he see more of her mother there, or more of himself? Or would she look more like that part that was just Murph?

He wasn’t going to find out, not this time. Maybe not ever. If she hadn’t forgiven him in two years…

Sighing, he put in some ear buds and left the booth.

Romilly was in the habitat module, looking particularly pensive and unhappy. Cooper hoped his nausea hadn’t returned. When it hit him, it was bad.

“You good, Rom?” he asked.

“It gets to me, Coop,” Romilly admitted. “This tin can. Radiation, vacuum outside—everything wants us dead. We’re just not supposed to be here.” He shook his head and looked miserable.

Cooper regarded the astrophysicist. He was the youngest member of the crew, and certainly the most highly strung. He would probably be better off behind a telescope than jetting off into space, but there weren’t that many astronomers, mathematicians—scientists of any sort—left in the world. NASA poached what talent they could find from the few colleges that remained, but Cooper knew first-hand how few and rarified a group that represented. And given that kids were being taught that the American space program had been Cold War propaganda, he doubted the brain pool was getting any deeper.

No, they were lucky to have Romilly.

As long as he didn’t freak out.

That had always been one of the greatest concerns regarding long-term space exploration. They’d offset the detrimental effects of prolonged weightlessness, at least to an acceptable degree. But the potential for mental deterioration could never be eliminated as a factor.

“We’re explorers, Rom,” he told him, trying for reassurance. “On the greatest ocean of all.”

Romilly just banged his fist against the hull of the ship. The sound it made was strangely flat.

“Millimeters of aluminum—that’s it,” he declared. “And nothing within millions of miles that won’t kill us in seconds.”

He wasn’t wrong there, Cooper knew. It also wasn’t the point.

“A lot of the finest solo yachtsmen couldn’t swim,” he replied. “They knew if they fell overboard, that was it, anyway. This is no different.”

Romilly seemed to chew on that without finding much to like in it. After a moment, Cooper passed him his ear buds, emitting the sounds of a thunderstorm: the pounding of the rain, the crack of lightning splitting the sky, the cricking and croaking of frogs.

“Here,” he said, hoping it would relax Romilly the way it did him.

It was way too early for any of them to start losing it.

The magnificence of Saturn filled most of Cooper’s field of vision, but it wasn’t what held his attention. Instead he was looking over Doyle’s shoulder as he parsed through a series of images. All were star fields which looked as if they had been photographed through a fish-eye lens.

“From the relay probe?” Cooper asked.

“It was in orbit around the wormhole,” Doyle confirmed. “Each time it swung around, we got images of the other side of the foreign galaxy.”

“Like swinging a periscope around,” Cooper said.

“Exactly,” Doyle replied.

“So we’ve got a pretty good idea what we’re gonna find on the other side?” Cooper asked.

“Navigationally,” Doyle said, as Brand came up from behind.

“We’ll be coming up on the wormhole in less than forty-five,” she said. “Suit up.”

Cooper strapped into the Ranger cockpit, gazing out at the space beyond Saturn as Romilly came into the cockpit, excitement plain on his face.

Cooper keyed the radio.

“Strap in,” he told the others. “I’m killing the spin.”

He began firing controlled bursts from the engines, pushing against the direction of rotation. Slowly but inexorably the motion slowed, until the Endurance was motionless—at least relative to its own axis. And as they ground to a halt, the peculiar belly-tickle of free-fall returned.

Ahead of them, Cooper made out a distorted patch of stars, and he felt a thrill of mixed fear and wonder tremor up his spine. This was why they were here, this improbable thing.

“There!” Romilly said energetically. “That’s the wormhole.”

“Say it, don’t spray it, Nikolai,” Cooper responded, trying to keep things on an even keel. But Romilly’s enthusiasm was undeterred.

“Cooper, this is a portal, cutting through space-time,” he said. “We’re seeing the heart of a galaxy so far away we don’t even know where it is in the universe.”

Cooper stared at the thing, the astrophysicist’s words doing a slow turn in his head.

“It’s a sphere,” he noticed.

“Of course it is,” Romilly said. “You thought it would be just a hole?”

Cooper suddenly felt like he was being called on to show his homework on the board—when he hadn’t done it.

“No,” he floundered. “Well, in all the illustrations…”

Romilly grabbed a piece of paper and drew two points on it, far from each other. He seemed delighted to have the opportunity to explain it all.

“In the illustrations, they’re trying to show you how it works,” he said, poking a hole in one of the points with his pen. “So they say, ‘you wanna go from here to there, but it’s too far?’ A wormhole bends space like this—”

He folded the paper so the hole overlapped with the second point, then stuck his pen through both, joining them.

“—so you can take a shortcut across a higher dimension. But to show that, they’ve turned three-dimensional space—” He gestured around at the cockpit, then held up the paper. “—into two dimensions. Which turns the wormhole into two dimensions… a circle.”

He looked at Cooper, expecting a response.

“But what’s a circle in three dimensions?” he prompted.

“A sphere,” Cooper replied, suddenly getting it.

“Exactly,” Romilly agreed, pointing toward their destination. “It’s a spherical hole.”

Cooper ruminated on that as the “spherical hole” loomed larger and larger.

“And who put it there?” Romilly continued, not ready to give it a rest. “Who do we thank?”

“I’m not thanking anyone till we get through it in one piece,” Cooper replied.

“Is there any trick to this?” Cooper asked Doyle, who had replaced Romilly in the cockpit. Ahead of them, he could see the quavering stars of the other galaxy, swinging in opposition to them as they moved. It was sort of like looking into a giant shaving mirror, and it was—to say the least—disorienting.

He fired the thrusters, easing their momentum toward the thing.

“No one knows,” Doyle said.

That didn’t sound very reassuring.

“But the others made it, right?” he asked.

“At least some of them,” Doyle replied.

Right, he thought. Some of them. He hadn’t thought to ask how many of the Lazarus pilots hadn’t sent back any signals at all, had just gone quiet after passing through the wormhole. And if it had been mentioned in one of the briefings, he must have missed it.

Or blanked it out.

“Thanks for the confidence boost,” Cooper said.

He took a deep breath, then, and let it out slowly.

“Everybody ready to say goodbye to the solar system?” he asked. “To our galaxy?”

Everyone seemed to understand that it was a rhetorical question, because no one answered. So without further comment, Cooper pushed the stick forward, nosing toward the anomaly and letting gravity have them, draw them toward the center of the wormhole.

Cooper realized he was holding his breath, waiting for some sort of impact, but of course there was nothing there to hit. Instead they simply crossed into it, and suddenly the Endurance was part of the distortion, its warped reflection coming towards them, passing through itself.

And the universe turned inside out.

Distorted images of space-time seemed to run off in every direction, Romilly’s paper bending not in three dimensions but in five, and it was happening at an ever-increasing speed, so everything was rushing by, accelerating at a dizzying pace. For the moment the Endurance seemed to be withstanding the elemental forces that lay beyond the hull. Cooper hoped it would stay that way.

He tried to grasp what it was his eyes were reporting. His brain told him they were racing along a sort of wall, a wall of stars and galaxies and nebulae streaking past at immense speeds. But if he shifted his gaze, it seemed more like a tunnel, albeit one that billowed out in the distance. He thought he could see an end to it, and yet that end didn’t seem to be getting any closer, as if it was withdrawing from them even more quickly than they rocketed toward it.

It was the most incredible thing Cooper had ever experienced, and like nothing he ever had or could have imagined. He wasn’t even sure he was going to be able to describe it later. But for now…

He looked down at his instruments. They were inert.

There was nothing there.

“They won’t help you in here,” Doyle said. “We’re cutting through the bulk, the space beyond our three dimensions.” He checked his own instruments. “All we can do is record and observe,” he concluded.

Back in the ring module Brand saw a sudden apparent ripple in the air itself, which swiftly multiplied into an undulating distortion inside the ship.

Bending toward her.

Moving.

“What is that?” Romilly gasped.

It was something of a relief to know that he saw it too.

She watched the distortion come, fascinated. It didn’t even occur to her to move. There was form there.

“I think…” she murmured, “I think it’s them.”

“Distorting space-time?” Romilly said.

Brand reached toward it.

“Don’t!” Romilly warned, as it touched her, and her hand began to ripple; like the air, like the wormhole. But she felt nothing, no pain.

Nothing but delight.

In the Ranger, Cooper saw they were at last reaching the light at the end of the tunnel. Yet it wasn’t one light, but many: star clusters and nebulae, galaxies and pulsars all getting closer and larger very quickly, much too quickly, impossibly fast…

And then they were out, the illusion of three dimensions snapping back into being, the rest of it folding away into the magical secret doors of the universe. It was sort of like watching a real person suddenly become a flat snapshot on paper. The image was recognizable, but depth and time—and the motion that time made possible—were all missing.

Only he didn’t have the words for what was missing now, or even the concepts that the words might identify.

On the console, the instruments suddenly came back to life now that there was something for them to sense—something to which they could react.

Cooper brought his eyes up again, and stared, awestruck to his core.

“We’re—here,” Doyle said.

Brand’s fingers were back to normal. The distortion was gone. But she kept staring at them.

“What was that?” Romilly asked her.

She touched her hand, remembering the presence, the sentience she had felt, out of phase, in different dimensions, but sharing the same space.

“The first handshake,” she replied.

SEVENTEEN

Earth’s sun was nowhere near the center of its galaxy, but was in a hinterland nearer the edge of it, where the stars were thin and distant from one another—a lonely house on a great plain.

Certainly not a condo in the city.

This place, this sky beyond the wormhole, this was more like New York. Or Chicago, at least. Stars blazed everywhere, some brightly enough to leave impressions on Cooper’s retinas. Gauzy nebulae draped between and among them, coloring whole quadrants of space with light refracted through gas and dust and the fresh brilliance of newly born stars.

From Earth, the only nebulae you could see with the naked eye were tiny dull smudges that looked like blurry stars. Here they hove up like thunderheads.

If their new home was indeed going to be here, it would have a much more interesting night sky. Probably a more interesting day sky, if it came to that.

I’m in another galaxy, he thought, trying to really grasp what had just happened. The closest star to Earth was so far away a light wave would take four years to travel between them. The nearest galaxy to Earth was two-and-a-half million light years away. Two-and-a-half million years for light to make the trip. This galaxy—this one could be anywhere.

If he had a telescope powerful enough to see home from here, he wouldn’t see his kids. Dinosaurs, maybe. Or trilobites. Or a cooling fireball. Or nothing, if he was more than five billion light years from Earth. Which he could easily be. According to Romilly, folding space a trillion light years would yield no longer a journey than folding it ten miles. But the distance after the fold—

That was real.

So to reach the planets on their itinerary, they still had to make their way through a lot of vacuum.

Far from home didn’t begin to describe how he felt in that moment.

Doyle studied his workstation. The initial maneuvering done, they were all back in the ring module, processing both their feelings and the data that was pouring in.

“The lost communications came through,” Doyle informed them.

“How?” Brand asked.

“The relay on this side cached them,” he explained, as he continued to parse through it.

“Years of basic data,” he added. “No real surprises. Miller’s site has kept pinging thumbs up, as has Mann’s… but Edmunds went down three years ago.”

“Transmitter failure?” Brand asked. Cooper heard the anxiety in her voice, and felt a little sorry for her.

“Maybe,” Doyle replied. “He was sending the thumbs up right till it went dark.”

“Miller still looks good?” Romilly asked.

As Doyle affirmed that, the astrophysicist began drawing a great big circle on a whiteboard.

“She’s coming up fast,” he said. “With one complication. The planet is much closer to Gargantua than we expected.”

“Gargantua?” Cooper said, not sure he liked the sound of it.

“A very large black hole,” Doyle explained. “Miller’s and Dr. Mann’s planets orbit it.”

Brand looked at the diagram Romilly was working on. If the big circle was the circumference of Gargantua, then the orbit he was tracing was pretty much the same.

“And Miller’s is on the horizon?” Brand said.

“A basketball around the hoop,” Romilly confirmed. “Landing there takes us dangerously close. A black hole that big has a huge gravitational pull.”

Cooper studied their grave faces, wondering why they were so concerned. It seemed easy enough for them to compensate.

“Look,” he said, “I can swing around that neutron star to decelerate—”

Brand cut him off.

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s time. That gravity will slow our clock, compared to Earth’s. Drastically.”

Cooper suddenly understood their expressions. Black holes did crazy things with time. He’d even mentioned that to Murph—but he had never believed it would actually be an issue he’d need to address.

As in many things, he had been wrong.

“How bad?” he asked, thinking that he most likely didn’t want to know.

“Every hour we spend on that planet will be maybe…” She did the mental computations. “Seven years back on Earth.”

“Jesus…” Cooper breathed.

“That’s relativity, folks,” Romilly said.

Cooper felt as if the floor had been pulled out from beneath his feet. All of a sudden Miller’s world seemed a helluva lot less hospitable.

“We can’t drop down there without considering the consequences,” he said.

“Cooper, we have a mission,” Doyle said.

“That’s easy for you to say,” Cooper returned. “You don’t have anyone back on Earth waiting for you, do you?”

“You have no idea what’s easy for me,” Doyle shot back, frowning.

Brand actually came to his aid, for once.

“Cooper’s right,” she said. “We have to think of time as a resource, just like oxygen and food. Going down there is going to cost us.”

Doyle relented, and stepped to the screen, a determined look on his face.

“Look,” he said. “Dr. Mann’s data looks promising, but we won’t get there for months. Edmunds’ is even further. Miller hasn’t sent much, but what she has sent is promising—water, organics.”

“You don’t find that every day,” Brand conceded.

“No, you do not,” Doyle agreed, his blue eyes flaring. “So think about the resources it would take to come back here…”

Yeah, Cooper granted. He’s got a point. In essence, getting from Miller’s planet to Mann’s would require climbing out of the deep gravitational well of Gargantua. It would be like swimming upstream, against the current. Which probably wouldn’t leave enough fuel for a return trip to Earth. If the choice was between getting back a little late and not getting back at all, he knew where he fell out.

“How far back from the planet would we have to stay to be out of the time shift?” Cooper asked.

Romilly pointed to his whiteboard drawing of the massive black hole and the planet skimming just above its horizon.

“Just back from the cusp,” he said.

“So we track a wider orbit of Gargantua,” Cooper said. “Parallel with Miller’s planet but a little further out… Take a Ranger down, grab Miller and her samples, debrief, and analyze back here.”

“That’ll work,” Brand said.

“No time for monkey business or chitchat down there,” Cooper emphasized. “TARS, you’d better wait up here. Who else?”

Romilly lifted his head.

“If we’re talking about a couple of years—I’d use that time to work on gravity—observations from the wormhole,” he said. “This is gold to Professor Brand.”

A couple of years, Cooper thought. He glanced at Romilly, and wondered if the man really understood what he was saying. He would be here—alone—for years. Of the four of them, Romilly had proven the least comfortable in space, the most susceptible to its physical and psychological perils.

Yet he would also be the least useful on the surface, and the most useful up here.

It felt like a huge decision to make in so little time, and not just because of Romilly.

Like Brand said, though, time was as much a resource to them as air. It wasn’t just seeing his kids again. If they lost too much time, there would be no human race to save, except for the embryos they’d brought with them. End result: no plan A.

And he was determined that there would be a plan A, come hell or high water.

“Okay,” he said. “TARS, factor an orbit of Gargantua—minimal thrusting, conserve fuel—but stay in range.”

“Don’t worry,” TARS said. “I wouldn’t leave you behind…” Abruptly he turned away from Cooper. “…Dr. Brand,” he finished, with a comic’s timing.

Cooper wondered if it might be a good idea to bring the robot’s humor setting down another notch or two.

Amelia Brand considered the black hole.

If the wormhole was a three-dimensional hole you could see through—albeit in a distorted fashion—Gargantua was a three-dimensional hole into nothing.

The average black hole had in some distant past been a star, and probably a really big one, merrily fusing hydrogen into helium, pushing enough energy out to keep its own gravity from making it collapse. But eventually, over billions of years, the hydrogen had all burned out, and it had to start using helium for fuel. And when the helium was all gone, it turned to progressively heavier and heavier elements.

Until one day it lost its fight with the gravity it had itself created. The force keeping it shining and inflated wasn’t enough to counter its mass. So it collapsed, victorious gravity crushing its atoms into denser and denser substances until finally crushing the atoms themselves in neutrons. The physical size of the star became less and less, but its gravity grew exponentially. In the end, even light couldn’t escape its pull, but it could still grow, swallowing nebulae, planets, stars.

Yet Gargantua was anything but “average.” Formed when the universe was young, perhaps at the center of a galaxy, it may have been the product of many smaller black holes, merging until its mass was at least a hundred million times that of the Earth’s sun.

Present-day Gargantua was frightening in its seeming nothingness. Yet past its horizon, past the point of no return, beyond which even light could not come back, Amelia could see an effect—a glowing disk surrounded the black hole, gas and particles captured by the immense gravity, whirling around it like water going down a spherical drain. So incredibly fast was the spin that the atoms collided with one another, hurling bursts of energy into the cloud, quickening it with light and blowing like a wind back out through the disk, creating plasma arabesques of breathtaking beauty.

But deeper, where that eldritch, glowing shroud met the Gargantua’s event horizon… was a horrifying nothingness.

“A literal heart of darkness,” Doyle said.

That didn’t seem sufficient to Amelia—as if the man was damning Gargantua with faint praise. She pointed, drawing his gaze from the terrifying naught of the black hole to a small, glowing point.

“That’s Miller’s planet,” she said.

Cooper turned to CASE, the robot, who was riding shotgun in the copilot’s seat.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yup,” the robot replied.

“Don’t say much, do you?” Cooper said wryly.

“TARS talks plenty for both of us,” CASE said.

Cooper chuckled, and threw a switch.

“Detach,” he said. Then he watched as the ring module seemed to drift away from them, and felt a moment’s hesitation.

Then Gargantua took hold of them, and they were suddenly streaking away from Endurance, ridiculously fast.

“Romilly, you reading these forces?” he asked, not quite believing what he was seeing.

“Unbelievable.” Romilly’s words crackled over the radio, but even from this distance, Cooper could hear the excitement in his voice. “If we could see the collapsed star inside, the singularity, we’d solve gravity.”

Cooper gazed down at the gaping black wound in the universe.

“No way to get anything from it?” he asked.

“Nothing escapes the horizon,” Romilly replied. “Not even light. The answer’s there, there’s just no way to see it.”

Cooper fastened his attention on the blue marble skimming along Gargantua’s event horizon, because it was coming up fast. He ran the trajectory one more time.

“This is fast for atmospheric entry,” CASE noticed. “Should we use the thrusters to slow?”

“We’re gonna use the Ranger’s aerodynamics to save fuel,” Cooper told the machine.

“Airbrake?” CASE said. Cooper noted for future reference that CASE apparently had an “are you kidding me?” setting.

“Wanna get in fast, don’t we?” he replied.

“Brand, Doyle, get ready,” CASE said. A robot couldn’t be nervous, Cooper knew, but somehow this one sounded anxious.

He watched the planet below. From a distance it hadn’t looked so different from Earth, but as they drew closer, he could see that it was much—well—bluer. He tried to pick out features—continents, islands—but all he could make out were clouds.

Then they reached the outskirts of the atmosphere and he didn’t have any attention to spare.

It started like a whisper, air so thin it would pass as vacuum compared to sea-level air on Earth. But at the speed they were traveling, those few molecules were compressed enough to make them practically much denser in their interaction with the plummeting vessel. That was good, actually, because this way they could ease into the atmosphere.

Well, maybe not ease, he thought, as the ship began to shudder and the air outside shrieked in protest. The Ranger’s nose began to glow as the friction from the atmosphere mounted, and every weld in the craft seemed to object as he tried to flatten out their course a bit, to engage the atmosphere like a jet, rather than a meteorite.

Cooper glanced at his instruments, and then back at the horizon.

“We could ease—” CASE began.

“Hands where I can see them, CASE!” Cooper shouted. “Only time I ever went down was a machine easing at the wrong moment.”

“A little caution,” CASE pleaded.

“Can get you killed, same as recklessness,” Cooper opined.

“Cooper!” Doyle chimed in. “Too damned fast!”

“I got this,” Cooper said, as the ship threatened to shake apart around them. His knuckles on the controls were white as he tried to keep them from vibrating out of his hands.

“Should I disable feedback?” CASE asked.

“No!” Cooper exploded. “No, I need to feel the air…”

The lander was white-hot now, cutting through a layer of clouds as thin as razors.

“Do we have a fix on the beacon?” he asked.

“Got it!” CASE said. “Can you maneuver?”

Yeah, he thought. We have our choice of crash sites, as long as most of them are more-or-less straight down.

“Gotta shave more speed,” he said instead. “I’ll try and spiral down to it.”

A moment later they burst through the clouds. The surface looked far too close to Cooper, but at least they seemed to be over a level surface…

“Just water,” Doyle said.

Cooper realized he was right. They were over an ocean.

“The stuff of life…” Brand said.

“Twelve hundred meters out,” CASE advised.

Cooper banked as hard as he could, trying to shed more speed. The surface was coming fast.

“It’s shallow,” Brand said. “Feet deep…”

Now they were low enough they were kicking up a splash, like an overgrown speedboat.

“Seven hundred meters,” CASE intoned.

Cooper watched the water sheeting toward him.

“Wait for it…” he said.

“Five hundred meters.”

Cooper yanked the stick back.

“Fire!” he said.

The retro-rockets kicked in just above the surface, punching back against their velocity. He tried to hold it, but the craft slewed sideways as the landing gear came down. They dropped, hit the water, casting up a spray. The impact nearly jarred Cooper’s teeth loose, but he held on stubbornly. Then when the air cleared, they were down, and everything looked good. Brand had been right—the water was really, really shallow—so much so that the landing gear held the Ranger just above the surface.

“Very graceful,” Brand managed. Cooper noticed she and Doyle were staring at him. Both of them looked a little roughed up.

“No,” he said. “But it was very efficient.”

They still just stared, but he pretty much ignored it, wondering how much time had already passed on Earth.

Days?

Months?

Better not to think about it, he decided.

“What’re you waiting for?” he barked. “Go!”

They snapped out of it then, unfastening their harnesses, checking their helmets. CASE detached himself from the floor and went to the hatch. It cracked open, and light and spray blew into the cabin.

It caught Cooper, then, in his gut—they were on another world.

EIGHTEEN

Amelia followed Doyle and CASE into the shallow sea. Cooper remained aboard the Ranger.

She experimented with sloshing through it as CASE took a moment to orient himself. The water felt thicker, heavier than it should. More viscous. It might have been the bulk of her spacesuit, but she didn’t think so. They had practiced with those underwater, back on Earth, in preparation for the mission.

Here, though, it was different.

“This way,” CASE directed. “About two hundred meters.”

Amelia looked in the direction the robot indicated. The water stretched out to the horizon, where it met a mountain range, misty with distance; one long ridge that vanished in each direction. The sight of the alien skyline arrested her for a moment, and she wished they weren’t in such a hurry. She had long dreamt of her first moments on an extra-solar planet, and this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. There should be a little ceremony, a little “That’s one small step.”

Instead they were in this tearing hurry, and it felt completely half-assed. But it was what it was. They weren’t here to set up flags and take pictures.

So she pushed forward.

Spacesuits, she decided after a few feet, were not well designed for wading. They were heavy, clumsy, and didn’t give one much of a feel for the surface on which one was walking. And that wasn’t the only thing making it difficult to make any progress.

“The gravity’s punishing,” Doyle panted.

“Floating around in space too long?” Amelia teased.

“One hundred and thirty percent Earth gravity,” CASE informed them.

Right, Amelia thought. That explained a lot. This much more gravity wasn’t ideal, but it was something people couldn adapt to. Water was a good sign, and with any luck, there would be at least some habitable land at the foot of the mountains…

They pushed on, with CASE still in the lead and Doyle falling behind.

After what seemed like an eternity, CASE stopped.

“Should be here,” he said, and with that he began moving in a search pattern. Amelia moved to join him.

“The signal’s coming from here,” she said, but as soon as she spoke, it didn’t make any sense. The beacon should be with the ship, yet the ship clearly wasn’t here. Even if Miller had crashed, the water here wasn’t deep enough to hide the wreck.

Where had it gone?

Suddenly CASE dropped down and began thrashing under the water. He looked for all the world like a film Amelia had once seen, of a bear fishing in a river. That is, if a bear were rectangular, and had metal instead of fur on its exterior.

Cooper watched Brand, Doyle, and CASE with mounting unease. He could almost feel the clock in his head ticking off the time passing back on Earth. How could humanity hope to live on a world so hopelessly out of synch with the rest of the universe?

His chest began to tighten, and he took deep breaths, trying to settle himself. He stared off at the mountains. Something about them reminded him of home, but he couldn’t quite figure out why. He remembered driving toward the mountains with Murph, watching them grow larger as he followed the directions left by “them” on Murph’s floor.

But that wasn’t it. The mountains that hid the old NORAD facility were relatively young peaks; jagged, snowcapped. These formed a startlingly uniform ridge, like a long fold in the planet’s crust. And as tall as they seemed, he couldn’t make out a snowline, unless it was at the very top—that thin little film of white.

Then he realized—it wasn’t mountains he was reminded of at all. Instead, he thought of a dust storm in the distance, a black wall churning across the land.

Doyle finally caught up with them, thoroughly out of breath.

“What is he doing?” Doyle asked, nodding at the mechanical.

CASE answered him by pulling something up from the seabed—if that was what it could be called. Silt streaming off of it suggested that it had been at least partially buried.

“Her beacon,” Amelia said, heart sinking. Where was Miller?

CASE dutifully began carrying the beacon toward the Ranger.

“Wreckage,” Doyle said, echoing her own thoughts. “Where’s the rest?”

But she was ahead of him—she had already spotted some flotsam.

“Toward the mountains!” she said, and she starting slogging that way as quickly as she could.

Cooper’s voice crackled over the radio.

“Those aren’t mountains,” he said. His voice sounded strange. She paused and looked at the range again. Did they seem a little more distant?

It had to be some sort of optical illusion.

“They’re waves…” Cooper’s disembodied voice told her.

That went through her like an electrical shock. Not waves, but a wave… one unbelievably huge wave. She could see the tiny white line of foam at the top of it. How high was it? A mile? More? Perspective made it impossible to tell.

It was moving away from them, thank God.

She had to get the recorder. It had to be here. She plowed through the water toward the wreckage.

Cooper heard some bumping below as CASE loaded the beacon. He watched the monster wave recede and then, a peculiar feeling in his gut, he turned to look in the direction it had come from.

And saw the next one looming over them, blotting out the sky.

“Brand, get back here!” he shouted frantically into the comm.

“We need the recorder,” she protested.

Before he could say anything, Doyle’s voice sputtered over the radio.

“CASE,” Doyle shouted. “Go get her!”

Cooper slammed his fist into the dash.

What the hell is Brand doing?

“Dammit!” he yelled. “Brand, get back here!”

But she was still out there, looking through the junk in the water.

“We can’t leave without her data,” Brand insisted.

“You don’t have time!” he replied.

He saw CASE pass Doyle, who was headed back toward the Ranger, struggling against water and gravity.

“Go, go!” Doyle yelled at the robot.

CASE blew past him, churning a wake as he made a beeline toward Brand, reconfigured in wheel-like form.

Cooper ran to the hatch and swung it open. In the distance, he saw Brand trying to lift something out of the water. He looked back at the approaching wave, knowing that it must be thousands of feet high, trying to judge how close it was, how fast it was moving, but the scale made it difficult for his mind to comprehend.

“Get back here, now!” he hollered.

Brand pulled something up. He couldn’t see what it was, but after a moment of struggle she slipped and fell backward. Whatever it was came down on top of her.

She didn’t get back up, although he could see her arms moving. Her face turned toward him, and even at that distance he saw it turn up, focused on the mountain of water hurtling toward them.

“Cooper, go!” she yelled. “Go! I can’t make it.”

“Get up, Brand!” he commanded.

“Go! Get out of here!”

But then CASE was there. He flipped the junk away from her, heaved her onto his back, and raced back toward the Ranger.

That’s when Cooper noticed Doyle, just standing there, transfixed by the impossible wave.

“Doyle!” he shouted. “Come on! CASE has her!”

The man shook it off and started running back as best he could, struggling with every step.

Cooper jumped back up into the cockpit and started powering up. All he could see now was the wave.

“Come on, come on…” he muttered. Time was almost up.

Desperate, he ran back to the hatch. Doyle had made it to the foot of the ladder, and CASE was arriving with Brand. Puffing, Doyle stepped aside to make way for the robot and its passenger.

“Go!” Doyle said.

CASE obediently pushed past him, jerking himself up the ladder and unceremoniously dumping Brand inside the ship. Then he turned to help Doyle, who was struggling to ascend the ladder himself.

Before he could get there, the Ranger suddenly jumped up as the leading edge of the surge heaved them out of the shallow trough and up the side of the wave. The Ranger tilted sharply and seawater slapped Doyle back, out of CASE’s grip, as it came raging across the hatch. The ship was lifted and everything went sideways.

That fast—the blink of an eye—Doyle was gone.

For that second, Cooper was without emotion. He saw Doyle swept away and knew with crystalline certainty that there was absolutely nothing he could do. Nothing but try to save himself and the others.

“Shut the hatch!” he told CASE.

CASE obeyed as Cooper stumbled across the tilting deck back to the controls.

“Power down! Power down!” he said. “We have to ride it out.” Emotion returned in a rush. He felt like a coward for abandoning Doyle, although he still understood it would have meant the end of all of them to keep the hatch open. But mostly he felt simple, unadorned fury.

And he turned it on Brand.

“We were not prepared for this!” he shouted.

They were already hundreds of feet in the air, sucked sideways up the mountain of water, and Cooper found himself tossed like a doll across the cockpit as the Ranger began to roll. He managed to grab Brand and jam her into her seat, and after that it was all he could do not to vomit or lose consciousness as everything turned around him.

It was like the Straights all over again; all control gone, at the mercy of the universe…

NINETEEN

After an eternity, the craft stopped rolling and settled upright. Cooper scrambled into his seat as water poured away from the canopy, and he could see their surroundings.

They were at the top of the wave. A glance at his instruments told him they were an absurd four freaking thousand feet above the surface. For a moment, the Ranger surfed along the foaming back of the leviathan, and the view was unreal. The papery clouds above, the sea stretching out in all directions, impossibly far below them, the distant back of the last wave on the horizon, a faint line of white in the other direction.

Cooper stared past the powered-down controls at the incredible fall they were about to take.

Then they took it. Once again he felt free-fall, but this time he knew there would be a stop at the end of it.

It was all a jumble of pain, terror, and near-absolute disorientation, and it seemed to last forever.

When the craft finally came to rest, Cooper groggily lurched to the control panel, his hands flying over the controls, powering up. Miraculously, everything came on, so he wasted no time in starting the engines.

They coughed. They sputtered. But they wouldn’t start.

Of course.

He felt the landing gear lift them out the water, and tried the engines again.

Still nothing.

“Too waterlogged,” CASE said. “Let it drain.”

“Goddamn!” Cooper shouted, hammering the console.

“I told you to leave me,” Brand said.

“And I told you to get your ass back here,” he retorted. “Difference is, only one of us was thinking about the mission.”

“Cooper, you were thinking about getting home,” she countered. “I was trying to do the right thing!”

“Tell that to Doyle,” he shot back.

The hurt registered in her eyes, and he was glad. He looked at the clock.

“How long to drain, CASE?” he asked.

“Forty-five to an hour,” the robot informed him.

Cooper shook his head and uncoupled his helmet. The cabin was pressurized. Everything smelled wet, but it didn’t smell like seawater or a pond. It smelled like distilled water that had been dumped on hot rocks—a mineral scent, but not salt.

“The stuff of life, huh?” he said. “What’s this gonna cost us, Brand?”

“A lot,” she said. “Decades.” Her voice was flat.

Cooper felt like he couldn’t breathe. Decades. Tom and Murph were adults already. How old? It seemed impossible. He rubbed his face, trying to comprehend it. He watched the wave go, knowing there would be another, and soon.

He tried to return his focus to the mission.

“What happened to Miller?” he asked.

“Judging by the wreckage,” Brand said, “she was broken up by a wave soon after impact.”

“How could the wreckage still be here after all these years?” he wondered aloud.

“Because of the time slippage,” Brand said. “On this planet’s time, she landed here just hours ago. She might have only died minutes ago.”

CASE indicated the beacon, back by the airlock.

“The data Doyle received was just the initial status, echoing endlessly,” the machine said.

Cooper felt his throat closing.

“We’re not prepared for this, Brand,” he said. “You’re a bunch of eggheads without the survival skills of a Boy Scout troop.”

“We got this far on our brains,” she said defensively. “Further than any humans in history.”

“Not far enough,” he said. “And we’re stuck here till there won’t be anyone left on Earth to save.”

“I’m counting every second, same as you, Cooper,” she said.

He digested that silently for a while. He wasn’t the only one who had left someone behind. Was her father even still alive? How old had he been when they left? And then there was Edmunds, maybe waiting out there, waiting for her to come rescue him.

“Do you have some way we can jump into a black hole and get back the years?” he finally asked.

She dismissed that with a wag of her head.

“Don’t just shake your head at me!” he snapped.

“Time is relative,” Brand said. “It can stretch and squeeze—but it can’t run backward. The only thing that can move across the dimensions like time is gravity.”

He knew that. He’d read it. But he wasn’t ready to give up. Brand didn’t know everything—that much was abundantly clear.

“The beings that led us here,” he said. “They communicate through gravity. Could they be talking to us from the future?”

She was silent for a moment.

“Maybe,” she said at last.

“Well if they can—”

Brand cut him off.

“Look, Cooper,” she said, “they’re creatures of at least five dimensions. To them the past might be a canyon they can climb into, and the future a mountain they can climb up. But to us it’s not. Okay?”

She took off her helmet and regarded him frankly.

“I’m sorry, Cooper,” she said. “I screwed up. But you knew about relativity.”

“My daughter was ten,” he said bitterly. “I couldn’t explain Einstein’s theories before I left.”

“Couldn’t you tell her you were going to save the world?” Brand asked.

“No,” he said. “As a parent, I understood the most important thing—let your kids feel safe. Which rules out telling a ten-year-old that the world’s ending.”

“Cooper?” CASE said urgently.

He looked, although he already knew what it had to be. And it was—another wave.

They had been more than lucky to survive the first one. He didn’t place great odds on making it through two. Even if they did, they would be waterlogged again, and have to wait another couple of decades.

Now or never.

“How long for the engines?” he asked.

“A minute or two,” CASE replied.

“We don’t have it,” Cooper snapped. He tried the engines again as the wave loomed over them. They coughed and blew out steam. But that was all.

He tried again.

Nothing.

And again.

“Helmets on!” he said, as the wave came upon them.

TWENTY

Cooper felt the ship lifting as the water began to climb. His mind ran desperately through the vessel’s systems, capabilities.

There had to be an answer…

Maybe there was.

“Blow our cabin oxygen through the main thrusters,” he told CASE. “We’ll spark it.”

The robot didn’t waste any time. There was an immediate shriek of air leaving the cabin, sucked toward the engines.

Brand barely got her helmet on in time.

“Come on, now,” Cooper said, taking a run at the engines again. We’ve only got one more shot.

This time the engines blasted to life, blowing the Ranger clear of the wave and up toward the beckoning sky, but the wave wasn’t ready to give them up. He watched the wall of water, heart hammering. But then they really kicked in, and the craft brushed past the monstrous crest, and they were beyond it, free.

In his last glimpse of the surface, Cooper thought he saw Doyle’s lifeless body lying in the shallows, but then the wave eclipsed his view.

He turned the Ranger skyward and pushed.

When Romilly met them as they entered the ring module, his appearance hit Amelia almost like a physical shock. She thought she was prepared.

She was wrong.

His beard now had gray in it. Wrinkles had developed around his eyes, and there was a lost look in those eyes, as if he didn’t quite believe they were really there—as if he were seeing ghosts.

“Hello, Rom,” she said.

“I’ve waited years,” Romilly said.

“How many years?” Cooper asked, a little harshly.

Romilly looked thoughtful.

“By now it must be—”

“Twenty-three years…” TARS provided.

Cooper’s head dropped.

“…four months, eight days,” TARS finished.

Cooper turned away from them.

“Doyle?” Romilly asked.

Amelia found she couldn’t meet Romilly’s eyes, but she shook her head. Then she forced her gaze back up, and grasped his hands.

“I thought I was prepared,” she told him. “I knew all the theory.” She paused, gathered her words. “The reality is different.”

“And Miller?” Romilly asked.

“There’s nothing here for us,” she told him.

She studied his aged face. Then a thought struck her.

“Why didn’t you sleep?” she asked.

“I did, a couple of stretches,” he said. “But I stopped believing you were coming back, and something seems wrong about dreaming your life away.”

He smiled faintly.

“I learned what I could from studying the black hole,” he went on, “but I couldn’t send anything to your father. We’ve been receiving, but nothing gets out.”

Twenty-three years, she thought. That would make her father…

“Is he still alive?” she asked.

To her relief, Romilly nodded. She closed her eyes.

“We’ve got years of messages stored,” Romilly said.

Amelia opened her eyes and saw that Cooper was ahead of her, settling into the booth.

Cooper sat staring at the comm for what seemed a long time before he worked up the nerve to turn it on.

“Cooper,” he finally said.

“Messages span twenty-three years,” the automated voice announced.

“I know,” he whispered. “Just start at the beginning.” The screen came to life, and there was Tom, just as he had looked in the last message, still seventeen.

“Hi, Dad—” Tom began.

With trembling fingers, Cooper paused the playback and took a breath, trying to steel himself.

Then he let it run.

“I met another girl, Dad,” Tom said. “I really think this is the one.” He held up a picture of himself and a teenaged girl, dark hair, dark eyes—she was pretty.

“Murph stole Grandpa’s car,” he went on. “She crashed it. She’s okay, though. Your truck’s still running. Grandpa said she would steal that the next time. I said if she did it’d be the last thing she did…”

Cooper leaned back and just let it come, tears streaming down his face. And it kept coming for a long time, and he kept hoping that maybe, maybe Murph would appear. But she didn’t. It was always Tom or Donald. So he watched them age.

He wasn’t sure how long he had been sitting there, but Tom was talking again. He looked twenty-something now.

“I’ve got a surprise for you, Dad,” he said. “You’re a grandpa.”

He held up a tiny, squinty-eyed infant, tightly swaddled.

“Congratulations,” Tom said. “Meet Jesse.”

Cooper smiled, feeling his eyes fill with tears. Knowing that the baby he was looking at now wasn’t a baby anymore.

His grandson…

“I wanted to name him Coop, but Lois said maybe the next one. Grandpa said he already had the ‘great’ part,” Tom went on, “so we just leave it at that…”

The screen cut again, then came back to life. Tom again, maybe a decade older. The boy was gone completely. What Cooper saw now was a weary man holding a lot of weight on his shoulders.

“Hi, Dad,” Tom said. “I’m sorry it’s been a while. What with Jesse and all…”

He paused, a sorrowful expression on his face, and Cooper realized something must have happened to the baby. His grandson. How long had he lived? What had he been like?

“Grandpa died last week,” Tom continued. “We buried him out in the back forty, next to Mom and Jesse.” He looked down. “Where we’d have buried you, if you’d ever come back.” His gaze returned to the camera. “Murph was there for the funeral,” he said. “I don’t see her so much anymore.”

Tom sighed, and his face settled into lines of resignation.

“You’re not listening to this,” he said. “I know that. All these messages are just out there, drifting in the darkness. I figured as long as they were willing to send them, there was some hope, but… you’re gone. You’re never coming back. I’ve known that for a long time. Lois says—that’s my wife, Dad—she says I have to let you go. So I am.”

He looked as if he wanted to say something more, then apparently he decided against it.

Cooper started to reach toward the screen, as if somehow he could ask Tom to stay, to tell him he was alive.

But he couldn’t.

On the screen, Tom reached his hand toward the camera.

“Wherever you are,” Tom said, “I hope you’re at peace.

“Goodbye, Dad.”

The screen went black, but Cooper kept looking at it, wiping the tears from his face, his heart like lead.

Goodbye, Donald, he thought. It was hard to believe Donald was dead. He’d been such a sturdy presence, so much a part of that place. And Cooper had put so much on him—first forcing him to pick up much of what Erin had left when she died, and then the kids themselves. And he had taken the load, quietly—with some commentary, but no real complaint. Not really, all things considered.

He owed the old man a lot, and there was no way to repay him.

Sometimes you have to see your life from far away for it to make sense, he thought. To see what was probably obvious to anyone else.

Goodbye, Tom, he said silently. Goodbye, son…

Of course Murph couldn’t forgive him. Her mother had left her forever, but her mother hadn’t any choice about it. Then her father had left, too. But her father chose to leave her. How could she forgive that?

How could he have not seen it? It had been right in front of him.

Like so many things.

The screen was still dark—the recordings were done. He couldn’t help but touch the screen, his only connection to his family.

And then the screen flashed back on. He pulled his hand back in surprise.

There was a woman looking at him, late thirties, early forties, flaming red hair. Beautiful. She started to say something, and then stopped, looking unsure. Then her eyes settled into a determined expression. It was shockingly familiar.

“Hello, Dad,” she finally said. “You sonofabitch.”

Cooper’s eyes widened.

“Murph?” he whispered.

“I never made one of these when you were still responding, ’cos I was so mad at you for leaving. When you went quiet, it seemed like I should just live with my decision.” She paused, then added, “And I have…

“But today’s my birthday,” she explained. “And it’s a special one because you once told me—”

Her voice caught, and for a moment she couldn’t speak.

“You once told me that when you came back we might be the same age… and today I’m the same age you were when you left.” Her eyes glistened as tears started to form.

“So it’d be a real good time for you to come back,” she said.

Then she switched off the camera.

Again, Cooper stared at the empty screen.

Happy birthday, Murph, he thought, stunned.

What have I done?

TWENTY-ONE

“I didn’t mean to intrude,” a voice said softly, as Murph wiped her tears. She turned and found Professor Brand there. She hadn’t heard his wheelchair approach.

“I’ve never seen you in here before,” he said.

Murph stood up.

“I’ve never been in here before,” she said. Without really thinking, she took the handles on the back of the wheelchair and began to conduct him into the corridor.

She’d thought he would never surrender to the chair—he’d tried to make do with canes and crutches at first, which led to more falls, one of them life-threatening. At some point she had managed to make him see that he could do what was really important to him sitting down, as well as standing—probably better.

“I talk to Amelia all of the time,” the professor said. “It helps. I’m glad you’ve started.”

“I haven’t,” Murph replied. “I just had something I wanted to get out.”

If he’d asked her, she might have gone further, but she might not have. And he didn’t ask—she knew he wouldn’t. Professor Brand had been part of her life for a long time. He’d pulled her out of school, brought her here to be educated, taken her under his wing. Given her something real to do.

Her father had been around for ten years of her life. The professor had been an everyday part of her existence for almost three times that long. She loved him, in a way, and he would probably say the same thing about her. But he respected the hard, secret core of her. He never tried to push into the thoughts and feelings onto which she put the strongest guards, and she in turn respected his silences, as well.

He spoke of Amelia often enough that Murph almost felt she knew her, even though they had only met the once, long ago. But as often as the professor brought her up, there was something he never admitted. Something Murph knew intuitively.

He believed he would never see his daughter again.

With that, she could empathize. It was a bond that held them together, this unspoken fear.

They reached the professor’s office a few moments later. He wheeled himself behind his desk.

“I know they’re still out there,” he said.

“I know,” Murph replied. She wasn’t so sure herself, but the professor needed her encouragement.

“There are so many reasons their communications might not be getting through.”

“I know, Professor,” she said.

“I’m not sure which I’m more afraid of,” he went on. “They never come back, or they come back to find we’ve failed.”

“Then let’s succeed,” Murph said.

He’s looking old, she thought. Weary. And—something else. Something she couldn’t place.

The professor pressed his lips together and nodded. He pointed at the formula that filled much of his office.

“So,” he began, “back from the fourth iteration, let’s run it with a finite set.”

Murph paused as she picked up her notebook.

Really?

“With respect, Professor,” she said, “we’ve tried that a hundred times.”

“And it only has to work once, Murph,” he replied.

She shrugged, and reluctantly began following his instructions.

Later, they sat on a walkway eating sandwiches and watching the continuing construction on the big ship. As his eyes wandered over the gigantic cylinder, she saw the pride on Professor Brand’s face, and it felt like old times, like when he’d first brought her here after her father left. When she’d first begun to learn about the mission, and to believe. To understand the purpose of her life.

“Every rivet they drive in could have been a bullet,” he said. “We’ve done well for the world, here. Whether or not we crack the equation before I kick—”

“Don’t be morbid, Professor,” Murph chided. She did it lightly, but the fact was that the professor’s death was something she really didn’t want to think about. Almost everyone important to her was dead, or might as well be. There were only Professor Brand and Tom, and she and Tom—well, there was something broken there.

“I’m not afraid of death, Murph,” the professor told her. “I’m an old physicist. I’m afraid of time.”

That tickled something in the back of her brain, but it wasn’t until after lunch, when they were back in his office, that it went from tickle to scratch, then to an epiphanic whack on the head.

“Time,” she said. “You’re afraid of time…”

She was sure, now.

“Professor,” she said, “the equation…?”

He looked up from his work. She took a deep breath, and plunged on.

“For years we’ve tried to solve it without changing the underlying assumptions about time,” she said.

“And?” he replied mildly.

“And that means each iteration becomes an attempt to prove its own proof. It’s recursive. Nonsensical—”

“Are you calling my life’s work ‘nonsense,’ Murph?” he snapped irritably.

“No,” she replied, feeling unaccountably a little angry herself. “I’m saying you’ve been trying to solve it with one arm—no, with both arms tied behind your back.”

She suddenly felt, not uncertain but… wary.

“And I don’t understand why,” she finished.

Professor Brand gazed at the floor, then started wheeling his chair away.

“I’m an old man, Murph,” he said. “Could we pick this up another time? I’d like to talk to my daughter.”

She nodded, watching him go, wondering what the hell was going on.

Amelia Brand watched her father age before her eyes. He talked about the mission, asked how she was, made note of minor aches and pains, and filled her in on the people she might remember. Someone named Getty had become a medical doctor. At first she didn’t know who he meant, because the Gettys she remembered had both been cyberneticists—until she remembered that they’d had a son, ten or twelve years old when she left.

She had been his babysitter, once or twice.

He told her that he had a bright new assistant: Cooper’s daughter. The girl, Murph, was working with him on the gravity equation, and he seemed confident that they nearly had it solved.

As the years passed, he continued to be optimistic. She kept hoping that in the next message he would declare “Eureka!” but in the course of messages that spanned more than two decades, it never happened. Still, plan A was proceeding apace, he assured her. The first of the huge ship-stations was nearing completion, awaiting only something to lift it free of the tyranny of planetary gravity.

He never said anything about it, but at some point she realized he was in a wheelchair, and it was probably permanent. And yet, even as frail as he appeared, she could still hear the passion in his voice, see it in his eyes. He had not bowed to time, and he didn’t expect anyone else to do so.

“Stepping out into the universe,” he told her toward the end, eyes watery but alert, “we must first confront the reality that nothing in our solar system can help us. Then we must confront the realities of interstellar travel. We must venture far beyond the reach of our own life spans, must think not as individuals, but as a species…”

TWENTY-TWO

Cooper nodded as Brand joined them. It was time to decide what to do next, to stop licking their wounds and move on.

“TARS kept Endurance right where we needed her,” Cooper said. “But it took years longer than we anticipated…”

An orbit was a controlled fall, really, and most weren’t stable over time. That had been known as far back as Newton, who spent gallons of ink trying to figure out why the planets hadn’t tumbled into the sun or spun off into space. In the end his best guess was that God just didn’t want it that way, so now and then He would toss a comet through the solar system to put everything back on track.

He put up the images of the remaining planets: Mann’s white dot and Edmunds’ red one.

“We don’t have the fuel to visit both prospects,” he said. “We have to choose.”

“How?” Romilly asked. “They’re both promising. Edmunds’ data was better, but Dr. Mann is the one still transmitting.”

“We have no reason to suppose Edmunds’ results would have soured,” Brand said. “His world has key elements to sustain human life—”

“As does Dr. Mann’s,” Cooper pointed out.

“Cooper,” Brand said, shooting him a look, “this is my field. And I really believe Edmunds’ planet is the better prospect.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Gargantua, that’s why,” she said. She stepped over to the display. “Look at Miller’s world—hydrocarbons, organics, yes. But no life. Sterile. We’ll find the same thing on Dr. Mann’s.”

“Because of the black hole?” Romilly asked.

She nodded. “Murphy’s Law—whatever can happen will happen. Accident is the first building block of evolution—but if you’re orbiting a black hole not enough can happen. It sucks in asteroids and comets, random events that would otherwise reach you. We need to go further afield.”

Murphy’s Law. In an instant he was back home, leaning on the truck, explaining to Murph that her name wasn’t something bad, that it was really an affirmation that life brought surprises, both good and bad. That he and Erin were prepared to deal with things as they came.

He knew he needed to focus on the moment. He understood what Brand was trying to say, and it sounded like a good argument. But he also knew there was something else behind her words, and Edmunds’ planet was so much further away…

“You once referred to Dr. Mann as the ‘best of us,’” Cooper said. He felt a tickle of conscience—he knew he was setting her up. But this was too important to let it slide.

“He’s remarkable,” Brand agreed, without hesitation. “We’re only here because of him.”

“And he’s there on the ground, sending us an unambiguous message that we should go to that planet,” Cooper said.

Brand’s lips thinned, but she didn’t say anything.

Romilly looked back and forth between them. He looked a little uncomfortable, perhaps sensing there was something going on beneath the surface of the conversation—something to which he was not privy.

“Should we vote?” Romilly asked.

Cooper didn’t feel good about what he was about to do. But now wasn’t really the time to worry about anyone’s feelings.

“If we’re going to vote,” he said to Romilly, “there’s something you need to know.” He paused. “Brand?”

She didn’t take the bait, but remained silent.

“He has a right to know,” Cooper insisted.

“That has nothing to do with it,” she said.

“What does?” Romilly asked.

Cooper left her a pause, but when she didn’t fill it, he did.

“She’s in love with Wolf Edmunds,” Cooper told him.

Romilly’s brow went up.

“Is that true?” he asked.

Brand looked stricken.

“Yes,” she admitted. “And that makes me want to follow my heart. But maybe we’ve spent too long trying to figure all this with theory—”

“You’re a scientist, Brand—” Cooper cut in.

“I am,” she said. “So listen to me when I tell you that love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful. Why shouldn’t it mean something?”

“It means social utility,” Cooper said. “Child rearing, social bonding—”

“We love people who’ve died,” Brand objected. “Where’s the social utility in that? Maybe it means more—something we can’t understand yet. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of higher dimensions that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen for a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.

“Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t yet understand it.” She sent a pleading look to Romilly, but he couldn’t meet her eyes. Cooper could guess what he was thinking—that Brand had probably lost it.

Or at least some of “it.”

She saw it, too, and so she brought her appeal back to him.

“Cooper, yes,” Brand conceded, wearily. “The tiniest possibility of seeing Wolf again excites me. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

Cooper had a sudden sense of déjà vu, and remembered his conversation with Donald on the porch.

“I’m not gonna lie to you, Donald,” he’d said. “Heading out there is what I feel born to do, and it excites me. That doesn’t make it wrong.”

“Honestly, Amelia,” Cooper said gently, “it might.”

Brand seemed to wilt. She knew she had lost. He felt for her, but he had to do what made sense. What got this done most quickly and certainly.

“TARS,” he said, “set course for Dr. Mann.”

Before she turned away, Cooper saw the tears start in Brand’s eyes.

After they were out of orbit and on their new trajectory, he found her. She was checking on the population bomb.

“Brand, I’m sorry,” he said.

“Why?” she asked, but her voice was tight. “You’re just being objective—unless you’re punishing me for screwing up on Miller’s planet.”

“This wasn’t a personal decision for me,” he said.

She turned from the metal and glass contraption and looked him straight in the eye. He felt her hurt and anger like a heat lamp on his face. It was surprising, in a way, to see her usual detachment so thoroughly compromised.

“Well, if you’re wrong, you’ll have a very personal decision to make,” she told him, a good fraction of acid in her tone. “Your fuel calculations are based on a return journey. Strike out on Dr. Mann’s planet, and we’ll have to decide whether to return home, or push on to Edmunds’ planet with plan B. Starting a colony could save us from extinction.”

She closed the panel.

“You might have to decide between seeing your children again… and the future of the human race.” She smiled, but there was nothing happy or friendly about it.

“I trust you’ll be as objective then,” she finished.

Murph stood with Tom, watching the field burn. Or, rather, the corn. Because Murph suddenly saw that each plant was its own fire—an incandescent stalk giving itself, spark by spark, to the dark black boil above the light, driving the smoke pointlessly toward the heavens. For a moment she comprehended each of them as filaments in a bulb, flames in a lantern, superheated rods of metal, an alien forest on a distant world. Each plant the maker and center of its own immolation, each burning alone. To say the field was burning was to miss what was really happening. A field was an abstraction. A single plant was not.

It was a life, being sacrificed so that others might survive.

Then the stalks came apart like paper, the updraft shredding some into rising shards, others slumping and crumbling into glowing piles; then that illusion faded, too. Soon there would be no corn, no field. Only carbon and dust, inseparable in their lifelessness.

“We lost about a third this season,” Tom said. “But next year… I’m gonna start working Nelson’s fields. Should make it up.”

Murph wanted to shake him, to make him understand that it would never be “made up.” But what was the point?

“What happened to Nelson?” she asked.

The expression on his face suggested she probably didn’t want to know, so she didn’t press it. This place, its people, the house she had grown up in—it all seemed so remote, and a little unreal to her now.

Tom started for the house, so she followed him. Behind them, the field continued its cremation.

Murph tried to appear interested in her food that evening, as Tom and Lois made small talk about the farm, and their six-year-old, Coop, sent her grins and made faces at her. The little boy reminded her of his namesake, in a lot of ways. Maybe more than he reminded her of Tom.

“Will you stay the night?” Lois asked. “We left your room like it was. My sewing machine’s in there, but…”

Murph studied her plate, pushing the food around. She liked Lois well enough, and she was certainly a good partner for Tom—dependable, sturdy, compassionate. Beyond that, Murph didn’t know her that well. She kept her visits short, and beyond the subject of farming, they didn’t have a lot of common ground.

“No,” she said, preparing an excuse. “I need to…”

Her gaze wandered toward the upstairs, then back to Lois, and she knew she didn’t want to lie to her.

“Too many memories, Lois,” she said.

Lois nodded in understanding.

“We may have something for that,” Tom said, as he and Coop started to take the dishes into the kitchen. As Coop took Murph’s plate, he began coughing—an awful, deep-chested cough.

The boy must have seen the concern on her face, because he started grinning at her.

“The dust,” he told her. Like it was nothing. As if being sick was just part of it these days, like a stubbed toe or a bloody nose. Normal childhood stuff no one could do a thing about.

Was that how Tom saw things? He might. Otherwise he would have asked her if she could do anything. Even if he didn’t really understand what she did, he knew she had access to science and medicine that most folks didn’t.

“I have a friend who should have a look at his lungs, Lois,” she said, as Tom and Coop went into the kitchen.

Lois nodded, and seemed about to say something when Tom came back in with a bottle of whiskey and sat down. Murph frowned briefly, but didn’t say anything.

Outside, she saw clouds of dust, rolling across the twilight plain.

On the drive back, churning across the same battered road she traveled with her father all those years ago, Murph wondered about Lois’s reluctance to discuss the idea of Coop seeing a doctor. Was she afraid Tom would see it as some kind of concession—an admission that he couldn’t provide everything his son needed? Or worse, would it force him to admit—to himself as much as anyone else—that things were getting worse?

But it wasn’t just Coop. It was getting worse for everyone, she knew. More people were getting sick—and staying that way. What had happened to Nelson? It was Tom who didn’t want to talk about that.

Projections showed that respiratory ailments were on the rise both in number of the afflicted and the severity, and dust was only part of the problem. Elevated nitrogen levels were taking their toll on human health, as well—directly and indirectly. In the seas, excessive nitrogen was causing widespread algae blooms and huge pockets of hypoxic waters, especially in shallow environments where reefs had once thrived. That, added to the climatic changes that had shifted major currents, was driving the greatest marine extinction since the Permian period—which was to say in the history of the planet.

Once the seas were dead, or mostly so, it would only be a very brief matter of time before what was left of the terrestrial ecosystem crashed. Life itself wasn’t in danger—bacteria, for instance, would continue to thrive. But an environment capable of supporting human life? That could be numbered in less than a handful of decades. Maybe. If they were lucky.

Not that most people knew any of this. If you listened to the news, things were just about to turn around. “Any day now.” Only she and a relative few others knew the truth. Without plan A, everyone on Earth was going to be dead in a generation. Two, at best.

She had spent all of her adult life dealing with the big end of that, with trying to save the race. But here she was at the other end of things, watching her nephew hack up his lungs. What if Coop, like his brother Jesse, didn’t survive long enough for plan A to begin?

She didn’t have to let that happen, whatever Tom did or didn’t believe. She could do something about it.

Suddenly she was distracted by a noise, and realized that the radio was trying to get her attention.

Doctor Getty met her as soon as she arrived, and started hustling her down the corridor.

Getty was a pleasantly boyish fellow. She liked his eyes, and his smile was nice, too. He wasn’t smiling now, though. His eyes were full of concern—and worse, compassion. They said what he wasn’t quite willing to vocalize.

“He started asking for you after he came to,” Getty explained apologetically, “but we couldn’t raise you…”

When they reached the room, she felt a little faint. Even bound to his wheelchair, there had always been something robust about Professor Brand, an energy that kept him going. You could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice.

Now, shockingly, she saw that it was gone, or almost so. He seemed tiny in the hospital bed, dwarfed by the machines monitoring him and keeping him alive. When she reached his bedside, she could barely hear his breathing.

“Murph? Murph,” he murmured.

She took his hand.

This isn’t happening, she thought. I’m not ready for this.

“I’m here, Professor,” she said.

“I don’t have much life…” He gasped for another breath. “I have to tell you…”

“Try to take it easy,” Murph said.

“All these… years. All these people… counted on me.”

“It’s okay, Professor,” she reassured him.

“I let… you all… down.”

“No,” Murph said, close to crying. “I’ll finish what you started.”

He looked up at her, tears welling over the failing light in his eyes.

“Murph,” he said. “Good, good, Murph. I told you to have faith… to believe…”

“I do believe,” Murph told him.

“I needed you to believe your father was coming back,” he said.

“I do, Professor,” she said.

“Forgive me, Murph,” he said.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” she said. But there was such anguish on his face, such abject shame. After all he had done, how could he feel like this? It wasn’t fair that he should die feeling as if he was a failure.

“I lied, Murph,” he sighed.

She blinked, wondering what the hell he could mean. Lied about what?

“I lied to you,” he went on. “There’s no reason to come back… no way to help us…”

“But plan A,” she said, confused. “All this—all these people—the equation!”

He slowly turned his head from side to side, tears streaming down his face. Then he sighed again, and his eyes weren’t looking at her anymore. His breath ebbed out slowly, and when it was time to draw another, his chest hardly moved.

“Did he know?” she whispered, desperately. “Did my dad know? Did he abandon me?”

His lips moved as he tried to say something else.

She leaned closer.

“Do… not… go… gentle… into…

“Into…”

“No!” she shouted. “No! Professor, stay! You can’t. You can’t leave!”

Getty was suddenly there.

“You can’t,” she said. “You can’t, you…”

Getty put his hand gently on her shoulder, and together they watched the life leave Professor Brand. Her question still floated around her, with no answer coming.

TWENTY-THREE

By the time Murph got up the nerve to send a message to Professor Brand’s daughter, her grief and confusion had become something else altogether.

“Dr. Brand,” she began, trying to stay in control, to keep her voice even and professional. “I’m sorry to tell you that your father died today. He had no pain and was… at peace.” She paused and added, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

She reached for the switch, to leave the lie where it lay. Odds were Brand would never hear the message, and if she did—well, she was in space, far from home. She would need comfort, and…

Murph pulled her hand back.

Amelia was his daughter. His daughter, part of the whole thing. She had trusted her father, and he had betrayed her so completely—her father had left her. Who and what was there left for her to trust?

Professor Brand had been a liar. She was not.

At peace, my ass, she thought bitterly. He died in agony for what he had done. And if when he stopped breathing he did find some sort of peace, he didn’t deserve it.

And he hadn’t answered her goddamn question, hadn’t given her the only answer she cared about. No, he had used his last freaking breath to freaking quote Dylan Thomas one last freaking time.

“Did you know, Brand?” she shouted. “Did he tell you? Did you know that plan A was a sham? You knew, didn’t you? You left us here. To die.

“Never coming back…”

On the Endurance, CASE registered Murph’s angry message as he watched the Ranger dwindle, carrying the others to the white world beyond the cockpit glass.

TWENTY-FOUR

Cooper studied Mann’s world as they approached the cloud cover, which looked for all the world like the fluffy cumulonimbus clouds of Earth—majestic and white, with high, curved peaks and deep, shadowy valleys. That seemed like a good sign, although they were so thick that he couldn’t see anything beneath them.

As they drew even nearer, he began to worry. What the heads-up display was telling him about the density of these clouds seemed… unreasonable. Nevertheless, he killed most of their downward velocity, hoping the instruments were wrong, yet unwilling to take chances.

Not after Miller’s world.

He banked, cutting through one of the clouds, which to his relief seemed to be entirely normal. Maybe it was the instruments that were screwy.

But as they entered the next one, a horrible shudder went through the Ranger. There was a terrible scraping sound as they lost some of the thermo panels on the wing.

Goddammit, he thought. Why can’t anything just be what it seems to be? Just as the mountains on Miller’s world hadn’t been mountains, most of these clouds weren’t just clouds. They were formations of frozen carbon dioxide—dry ice—sublimating to create a deceptively delicate sheath of vapor around them.

Grateful that he had trusted his gut, and not gone plowing straight into them, he banked again. He picked his way gingerly, proceeding as if through a frozen minefield, taking direction from TARS. And always following the beacon.

As a kid he’d once flown cross-country on a commercial airliner. Back then, as they passed through and above a wonderland of clouds, he had fantasized about being able to walk on them, ride them across the sky.

It looked like he would get his chance.

Be careful what you wish for, he mused.

They approached the beacon. The signal was coming from high on a frozen cloud mountain. Cooper gave the radar profile a quick once-over, and was convinced that he didn’t want to park right next to it. The icy platform it presented was too small and unstable. Instead, he settled for a larger, flatter, denser stretch a little below it.

Once down, they began fastening their helmets, but without the blind rush that had driven them on Miller’s world. They were well beyond Gargantua’s time-bending zone, so there was no point in charging headlong into things. He took a good long scan around them to make sure something nasty wasn’t coming up from beneath, dropping down from above, or sneaking in from the sides.

Still, there wasn’t a lot of time to waste, so once he felt pretty secure about the stability of their perch, TARS opened the hatch. Stepping carefully out of the airlock and onto the ice, the four of them began hiking up-slope toward the beacon, TARS bringing up the rear. Cooper hoped desperately that they weren’t in for another game of hide and seek.

But when he crested the ridge he saw it instantly—an orange smudge nestled in the drifts of ice-shatter. He picked up his pace, and soon was gazing at the iced-over form of a Lazarus pod. TARS moved up behind him and began to dig it out, while Cooper prepared for the worst. Mann could easily be as dead as Miller, except this time there would be a body to view. He glanced at Brand and Romilly, and saw the same dread hanging on their expressions.

Once the craft’s airlock was clear and open, Cooper stepped in cautiously. The cabin was empty of life, eerie in the faint blue light filtering through the icy windows. Then TARS powered the module up and the lights came on. Cooper saw the cryo-chamber and moved toward it, as TARS clanked along behind him. With his gloved hand he brushed ice from the nameplate.

Dr. Mann, it read.

After a quick status check, TARS activated the cryo-chamber, and the ice began to melt. While he did that, Cooper shut the airlock again. Once it was sealed and the air cycled, he doffed his helmet. The air was stale, but breathable, and tinged with the slight acrid scent of ammonia. There was a mechanical robot, like TARS and CASE, lying off to one side, dismantled.

After a short time the cryo-bed signaled all was ready, and Cooper cracked the lid open, revealing the plastic-shrouded figure inside. He was still ready for the worst. The water around the body was now a bit warm, and vapor drifted up into the chilly air.

Cooper found the seal in the plastic, and ripped it open.

A man about his own age lay there. His squared-off face was strong even in sleep, but as Cooper watched, his eyes flickered open, blue, at first without focus, looking at nothing. Then—confused and maybe frightened—he reached for Cooper with trembling hands and grabbed him, embraced him cheek to cheek.

Mann began sobbing, caressing Cooper’s face as if it was the face of his mother. Cooper didn’t mind, and was in fact overwhelmed by a deep compassion for the man. Unable to even imagine what he was feeling, he just held him tightly, the way he had held his kids when they woke from a nightmare.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

“Pray you never learn just how good it can be, just to see another face.”

Mann spoke in a husky voice. His hands shook his mug of tea as he took a sip from it. He looked from face to face, as if each was the most amazing thing he had ever seen.

“I hadn’t much hope to begin with,” he went on. “After so much time, I had none. My supplies were exhausted. The last time I went to sleep, I set no waking date. You have literally raised me from the dead.”

Cooper shot him a smile.

“Lazarus,” he said.

Mann nodded, then flicked his eyes up.

“And the others?” he asked.

“I’m afraid you’re it, sir,” Romilly said.

Mann looked a little stunned.

“So far, surely?” Mann said hopefully.

“With our situation,” Cooper told him, “there’s not much hope of any other rescue.”

It was almost as if Cooper had punched him. Mann looked down at his tea, dazed by grief. They let him have his moment of silence.

“Dr. Mann,” Brand said, after a bit, “tell us about your world.”

“My world,” he said softly. “Yes. Our world, we hope. Our world is cold, stark, but undeniably beautiful…”

“The days are sixty-seven cold hours,” Mann told them. “The nights are sixty-seven far colder hours…”

He turned and led them back toward the shelter of his landing craft.

“The gravity is a very pleasant eighty percent of Earth’s,” he said. “Up here, where I landed, the ‘water’ is alkali and the ‘air’ has too much ammonia in it to breathe for more than a few minutes. But down on the surface—and there is a surface—the ammonia gives way to crystalline hydrocarbons and breathable air. To organics. Possibly even to life. Yes, we may be sharing this world.”

Brand began checking Mann’s data, and the more she read, the more she seemed positively giddy. Finally she looked up from the screen.

“These readings are from the surface?” she asked, as if it didn’t seem real.

“Over the years I’ve dropped various probes,” Mann confirmed.

“How far have you explored?” Cooper asked.

“I’ve mounted several major expeditions,” Mann said. “But with oxygen in limited supply, KIPP there had to do most of the legwork.” He indicated the machine that could have been a brother to TARS or CASE, except that it was lying about in various pieces.

“What’s wrong with him?” TARS asked.

“Degeneration,” Mann replied. “He misidentified the first organics we found as ammonia crystals. We struggled on for a time, but ultimately I decommissioned him and used his power source to keep the mission going.” He shook his head sadly. “I thought I was alone before I shut him down.”

“Would you like me to look at him?” TARS asked.

“No,” Mann said. “He needs a human touch.”

TARS didn’t reply. Instead he turned abruptly to Brand.

“Dr. Brand,” he said, “CASE is relaying a message for you from the comm station.”

She nodded, and TARS began the playback on his data screen.

Cooper’s stomach clenched as the face of a woman appeared. It took a moment for him to recognize it as the face of his daughter.

Murph!

But she wasn’t calling him, she was calling Brand, and worse, Murph was delivering the news that Brand’s father was dead. He couldn’t tell which of the two women seemed more upset at the news, but it looked as if it was Murph.

“He had no pain and was… at peace,” she was saying. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Is that Murph?” Brand asked in an abstract voice.

Cooper nodded and tried to think of something to say as he watched Murph reach to turn the camera off.

“She’s become a—” Brand began, but she didn’t finish, because Murph didn’t turn off the camera. She pulled her hand back, and a strange look came over her. Anger, instant and intense.

“Did you know, Brand?” Murph demanded furiously. “Did he tell you? That plan A was a sham? You knew, didn’t you? You left us here. To die.

“Never coming back…”

Stunned, Cooper stared at Brand’s face, watched the shock run across it. He wanted to ask what the hell she was talking about, but couldn’t find the words.

“You left us here to set up your colony,” Murph went on, tears starting down her cheeks. He stared aghast as she struggled with her next words, and he knew. He knew what she was going to ask.

As quickly as it had appeared, the anger was gone, and her voice became very small.

“Did my father know?” she asked. “Dad…?”

And somehow, over impossible distance and through strange, twisted time, she was looking straight into his eyes.

“Did you leave me here to die?”

Then the screen did go dark, and he felt the whole of himself ache and he knew it was true, that he should have known. Should always have known.

Suddenly he realized that Brand was staring at him.

“Cooper,” she said, “my father devoted his whole life to plan A. I have no idea what she means—”

“I do,” Mann said quietly. Cooper turned to find him looking at them with an expression of gentle compassion. But before he could continue, Cooper found his voice.

“He never even hoped to get people off Earth,” he said. He felt husked out, like a stalk of corn rotted by the blight. Empty for the moment, although he was certain the pain would come.

“No,” Mann confirmed.

“But he’s been trying to solve the gravity equation for forty years!” Brand protested.

Mann stepped closer and regarded her empathetically.

“Amelia,” he said, “your father solved his equation before I even left.”

“Then why wouldn’t he use it?” she asked, in a tortured voice.

“The equation couldn’t reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics,” he told her. “You need more.”

“More what?” Cooper demanded.

“More data,” he replied. “You need to see inside a black hole. And the laws of nature prohibit a naked singularity.”

“Is that true?” Cooper asked Romilly. The astrophysicist nodded.

“If a black hole is an oyster,” Romilly explained, “the singularity is the pearl inside. Its gravity is so strong, it’s always hidden in darkness, behind the horizon. That’s why we call it a black hole.”

“If we could look beyond the horizon—” Cooper said.

“Some things aren’t meant to be known,” Mann told him.

That’s it? Cooper wondered. That’s all you’ve got? It seemed to him an absurd thing for a scientist to say. Like the fox in the fable, unable to reach the grapes, declaring they must be sour anyhow. But how many times in history had that declaration been made, and how often had those who said it been proven wrong?

The black hole was right there.

There had to be a way.

Mann turned to speak to Brand again.

“Your father had to find another way to save the human race from extinction,” he said. “Plan B. A colony.”

Yet Brand still wasn’t willing to give up the point. That made Cooper feel better, because he didn’t think she was acting. She hadn’t been in on it. Hadn’t been lying to him all of this time.

“But why not tell people?” Brand demanded. “Why keep building the damn station?”

“How much harder would it be for people to come together and save the species instead of themselves?” Mann gave Cooper a sympathetic glance. “Or their children?”

“Bullshit,” Cooper said flatly.

“Would you have left, if you hadn’t believed you were trying to save them?” Mann challenged. “Evolution has yet to transcend that simple barrier—we can care deeply, selflessly for people we know, but our empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight.”

“But the lie,” Brand said, her voice low and disbelieving. “The monstrous lie…”

“Unforgivable,” Mann agreed. “And he knew it. Your father was prepared to destroy his own humanity to save our species. He made the ultimate sacrifice.”

“No,” Cooper said, feeling the boil, the fury at so ludicrous a claim: that the sacrifice of one man’s reputation rose anywhere near the level of “ultimate.”

“No,” he said grimly. “That’s being made by the people of Earth, who’ll die because in his arrogance, he declared their case hopeless.”

Mann gave him a look, and under other circumstances his expression might have seemed earnest. Now it only seemed condescending.

“I’m sorry, Cooper,” he said. “Their case is hopeless. We are the future.”

Then the bottom dropped out of everything. Cooper realized that he should have known better. He had just been so damned eager to get back into space, he’d been prepared to believe any goddamn thing Professor Brand said.

“I’m asking you to trust me,” he’d said. “When you return, I’ll have solved the problem of gravity. You have my word.”

Brand put a hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t move.

“Cooper,” she said. “What can I do?”

He took a moment.

“Let me go home,” he said.