Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization

TWENTY-FIVE

A muddy dawn filtered through the dusty sky as Murph steered the pickup. Smoke rose in black pillars from burning fields, like offerings to some savage god of old.

“Are you sure?” Dr. Getty asked from the passenger’s seat.

“The solution was correct,” she said. “He’d had it for years.”

“It’s worthless?”

“It’s half the answer,” she said. She saw more dust ahead, probably kicked up by traffic on the road.

“How do you find the other half?” he asked.

She released one hand from the wheel and pointed to the sky.

“Out there?” she said. “A black hole. Stuck here on Earth? I’m not sure you can.”

They were near enough to see the convoy now, trucks and cars piled high with clothes, furniture—whole households of belongings reduced to what a car could hold. Their owners were packed in wherever they could find space.

“They just pack up and leave,” Getty observed in a puzzled tone. “What are they hoping to find?”

“Survival,” she said. Then she saw it—the wall of dust, the black blizzard bearing down on them like an unstoppable juggernaut.

“Dammit!” she said as it rushed over them, eclipsing the road, the empty storefronts and abandoned houses, erasing everything from their sight. Inside of the cloud, it might as well have been night.

She pulled over and turned the engine off. They sat there, the truck rocking in the wind as the dust began trying to bury them in earnest. She remembered another storm—the last one she had been in with her family, before the coordinates appeared on her bedroom floor. She remembered her father’s concentration, his determination to get them home safe.

Murph remembered, too, the validation she had felt after they reached the house, when he saw the pattern, and took it seriously. It had felt like such a victory.

And yet he had never taken the rest of it seriously.

Her ghost.

The books.

How could he have been so selective? she wondered. Why hadn’t he wanted to know what it all meant, rather than focusing on the easy part? But she knew the answer—most likely she always had. He’d only been interested in the part that told him what he wanted to hear: that he had been chosen, that it was his destiny to go into space. He’d kept his focus narrow on purpose, so things would remain simple, and his decision would be easy because it was inevitable.

She wondered, now, if she hadn’t been doing the same thing for years. Was there something she was missing—some bigger picture that had been obscured by her anger? By the hurt of him leaving? Had she trusted the professor so much because she needed to feel she had someone trustworthy in her life? She should have seen what he was up to—or rather, wasn’t up to—years ago. Instead she had blindly bumped her head against his self-imposed barrier for decades. Narrow focus. Keep it simple.

Just like Dad.

It was like the problem with gravity—trying to make the theory of relativity mesh with quantum theory. Both worked fine in describing the nature of the universe, each on a different scale—the very large in the case of relativity, and the very small in quantum theory. But held side by side they seemed contradictory. In the singularity inside a black hole, the two must come together and be merged.

Yet the universe was. It existed, and it worked. Somehow. So the apparent contradiction wasn’t in the physical world—it was the result of imperfect data, a wrong way of looking at things. Faulty equations based on mistaken assumptions.

Her ghost wrote with gravity, pushed books from their shelves with it. Her ghost told her father where to go, how to leave—and then it begged him to stay. Could that contradiction be reconciled, or was one end or the other of that equation just plain wrong?

She had been ten. Maybe the Morse code interpretation had been wishful thinking—an attempt to interpret data the way she wanted it to be interpreted. The floor pattern, after all, had been binary.

And yet Morse was binary, in a way…

“Don’t people have the right to know?” Getty asked, cutting off her ruminations.

She’d thought about that, pondered the lie. But she had also begun to come to terms with it, in a way. Not with the professor himself, but with the illusion he had maintained.

“Panic won’t help,” she said. “We have to keep working, same as ever.”

“Isn’t that just what Professor Brand—?”

“Brand gave up on us,” she snapped, her anger flaring. “I’m still trying to solve this.”

“So you have an idea?” Getty asked.

“No,” she said. “I have a feeling.”

She felt his gaze on her as she stared out into the dust.

“I told you about my ghost,” she said, after a few heartbeats.

She remembered being ten, just out of the shower, her hair wet, a towel around her neck, finding the book on the floor and the broken lunar lander model beside it.

She placed her hand on the car window, watching the dust sleet by, looking for patterns in it. Equations. Morse code. “Murph, you wanna talk science, don’t just tell me you’re scared of some ghost. Record the facts, analyze—present your conclusions.”

“My dad thought I called it a ghost because I was scared of it,” she told Getty. “But I was never scared of it.” She remembered counting the books, drawing lines to represent them. Trying to decode the message—because she knew there was a message.

She turned from the window and regarded Dr. Getty once again. Why was she telling him this? She had mentioned the ghost to him once, but she had left it at that—the story of a childhood mystery. And yet she had never told anyone else even that much. And now she was babbling on…

Maybe it was because he wasn’t a mathematician or an astrophysicist, because the concerns of their work didn’t overlap much. He wouldn’t know when she was stepping from the terrain of the accepted into the terra incognita of La-la Land. Or maybe he was just a good listener. Or it could be because he was here, now, in her little bubble in the dust, and she felt for some reason that there was an urgency about all of this.

“I called it that because it felt like—like a person,” she went on. “Trying to tell me something…”

The dust was thinning as the wind dropped off.

A short one this time, thank God.

She started the engine.

“If there’s an answer here on Earth,” she said, “it’s back there, somehow. No one’s coming to save us.”

She pulled back onto the road, such as it was, and continued on.

“I have to find it,” she said.

She pulled past a pickup, stuffed almost comically with belongings and passengers. But there was nothing comical about the two kids in back, the dust smeared on their faces and clothes, the lost look in their eyes.

“We’re running out of time,” she said.

TWENTY-SIX

Cooper propped his feet up on the console of the Ranger, and watched through the windshield as CASE brought the lander down, its braking rockets flaring before it gently settled onto the ice. The lander wasn’t as sleek as the Rangers—it was a bit boxier, more plough horse than racehorse, handsome rather than beautiful.

TARS was out on the wing of the Ranger, making repairs.

“What about auxiliary oxygen scrubbers?” CASE asked via radio.

“They can stay,” Cooper said. “I’ll sleep most of the journey.” He smiled sardonically. “I saw it all on the way out here.”

In his mind, he was already on the way home, but in fact, there was a great deal to do before he could jet off. Anything he could live without—like the auxiliary scrubbers—would be left behind, for Brand, Romilly, and Mann to use in building humanity’s “future.”

Likewise, there was a lot of stuff that needed to be brought down from the Endurance—obvious things like the population bomb with its cargo of unborn, but also anything else they might possibly need. It would be an ongoing process—the Endurance had made her last voyage, and while fuel remained the crew would continue to cannibalize the ring-ship for parts, until they became capable of finding, extracting, and processing the natural resources of their new home.

It was only fair that he help them begin the process. After all the time he’d lost, another day or two wouldn’t make much difference.

He looked up as Romilly came through the airlock and released his helmet. It still came as a bit of a shock, seeing the age on him. And it served as a reminder of what he faced if he managed to return to Earth.

“I have a suggestion for your return journey,” Romilly said.

“What?” Cooper asked.

“Have one last crack at the black hole.”

Behind Romilly, TARS entered the ship.

“Gargantua’s an older, spinning black hole,” Romilly went on. “What we call a gentle singularity.”

“Gentle?” He remembered the force yanking them toward Miller’s world, the nearly two-mile-high tidal waves, the razor’s edge of naught that was Gargantua’s horizon.

“They’re hardly gentle,” Romilly qualified, “but their tidal gravity is quick enough that something crossing the horizon fast enough might survive… a probe, say.”

“What happens to it after it crosses?” Cooper asked.

“Beyond the event horizon is a complete mystery,” Romilly said. “Who’s to say there isn’t some way the probe can glimpse the singularity and relay the quantum data? If he’s equipped to transmit every form of energy that can pulse—X-ray, visible light, radio…”

“Just when did this probe become a ‘he?’” Cooper asked.

Romilly suddenly looked awkward.

“TARS is the obvious candidate,” he said, sheepishly. “I’ve already told him what to look for.”

“I’d need to take the old optical telescope from KIPP,” TARS said in his matter-of-fact way.

Cooper regarded TARS. If there was still any chance for plan A, didn’t they have to take it? But at what cost? Sure, TARS was a machine, but he was a person, too—in a way.

“You’d do this for us?” Cooper asked the machine.

“Before you get teary,” TARS said, “try to remember that as a robot I have to do anything you say, anyway.”

“Your cue light’s broken,” Cooper said, when no LED came on.

“I’m not joking,” TARS replied.

Only then did the light flash on.

Brand and Mann met him at the foot of the ladder.

“Ranger’s almost ready,” Cooper told them. “CASE is on his way back with another load.”

“I’ll start a final inventory,” Brand offered.

“Dr. Mann,” Romilly said, “I need TARS to remove and adapt some components from KIPP.”

Mann cocked his head and regarded the robot for a moment.

“He mustn’t disturb KIPP’s archival functions.”

“I’ll supervise,” Romilly assured him.

Mann still seemed reluctant, but then he nodded.

Cooper listened to the exchange a little impatiently. He had his own concerns. He didn’t feel as if he could leave until a couple of things had been dealt with. First and foremost they needed to establish the location of the colony Brand, Mann and the rest would found. He could bring that information back to Earth, in case they did manage to send another expedition. And it would also ease his mind to see the place, to know concretely that his friends—that the human race—had a new home.

“We need to pick out a site,” Cooper told Mann. “You don’t wanna have to move the module once we land it.”

“I’ll show you the probe sites,” Mann said, as a hard wind blustered across the frozen cloudscape.

“Will conditions hold?” Cooper asked, eyeing the sky.

“These squalls usually blow over,” Mann said. “You’ve got a long-range transmitter?”

Cooper checked the box plugged into the neck-ring of his spacesuit.

“Good to go,” he said.

Mann pointed at the thrust nozzle in his elbow joint.

“Charged?” he asked. Cooper double-checked and gave him a thumbs up.

Without further hesitation, they set off. After a few moments, the lander passed over them, with CASE at the controls. Cooper reached up and keyed his long-range transmitter.

“A little caution, CASE?” he said.

“Safety first, Cooper,” CASE shot back.

Cooper and Mann tracked on over the sculpted ice, the surface grinding beneath their boots.

Cooper had changed his mind about Mann’s world as he got to know it better. It was nothing like any place on Earth. Where they now walked, the clouds were no longer white, but rather a sort of charcoal color, as if they were frozen thunderheads. Of course, he knew that the color came from minerals frozen in the ice, and there were probably places on Earth with similar dirty snow. But nowhere on his home planet did any glacier rise into such strange configurations, spreading in the sky above, dropping off into blue darkness below, winding into formations like gigantic, frozen worms.

After a time they came to an edge, and a drop of about fifty feet.

“Just take it gently,” Mann said, stepping off the cliff. The jets at his elbows flared, slowing him so he landed with a light thump instead of a splat. A little less sure of himself, Cooper followed.

The lighter gravity made everything seem a little dreamlike, even in the heavy suit. Acceleration didn’t feel quite right, nor did the kick of his thrusters when he fired them. Evolution had built his brain for thirty-two feet per second per second, and that wasn’t how physics played here.

He landed in a massive canyon of ice. Beautiful, as Mann had said, but also daunting. It made him feel insignificant. Gazing at the wind-sculpted walls, he wondered how old the ice was, what forces other than wind had shaped it. What the unseen surface below was like. Mann said there was air present, and organics, but with this superstrata of frozen clouds it was going to be dark, wasn’t it? And cold, probably much colder than up above.

He imagined the plan B kids, born into that dark, icy world. Romilly and Brand would tell tales of a warmer, sunnier place, but in a few generations those stories would be forgotten, and permanent night and winter would be all they would know.

Was this what “they” had planned? Their mysterious benefactors who scribbled coordinates with gravity?

Somehow it didn’t seem like enough.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t dark down there—maybe the ice splintered the light into constant rainbows, and geothermal forces created hot spots as comfortable as any tropical paradise. Mann seemed confident enough in the place.

Anyway, it was almost out of his hands now. He was nearly quit of plan B.

Then he realized Mann was talking to him.

“Brand told me why you feel you have to go back,” he said.

Cooper set his feet. He’d been afraid of this.

“If this little excursion is about trying to change my mind,” he said, “let’s turn around right now.”

“No,” Mann assured him. “I understand your position.”

He turned and continued walking.

Still a little suspicious, Cooper followed.

“You have attachments,” Mann went on. “I’m not supposed to, but even without family, I can promise you that the yearning to be with other people is massively powerful. Our instincts, our emotions, are at the foundations of what makes us human. They’re not to be taken lightly.”

A wind whipped down the canyon, gusting ice crystals between them.

After introducing Getty to Lois and Coop, Murph slipped upstairs to her old bedroom. Part of her was almost afraid of what she might see there, of the memories it would stir. She knew, though… she knew that this was where it started, that there was something this place could tell her.

Had been waiting to tell her.

After a little pause, she opened the door.

“Mama lets me play in here.”

She realized with a start that Coop had followed her. The boy pointed to a box on one of the shelves.

“I didn’t touch your stuff,” he said, with the over-earnestness of a child who wasn’t telling the truth.

It didn’t matter, of course. She didn’t have any use for whatever was there, did she? If she had, she would have taken it long ago.

As Amelia watched the lander descend, she felt a sense of finality come over her, a door closing forever, or like—what was the old expression? As if she was burning the bridge behind her. This was really it. She was going to spend the rest of her life here, watching over plan B, rearing children who would never know any other mother than her, no fathers other than Mann or Romilly.

Cooper was going—and with him all hope for Wolf.

Why didn’t you tell me, Dad? she asked the mute ghost of her father. Why didn’t you trust even me? But what would she have done with that knowledge? Would she have warned Cooper away? Without him, they would never have gotten this far. Would she have been able to lie to him, in the name of the greater good?

Maybe.

Probably. But her father had robbed—or spared—her knowing for sure if she was capable of his sin.

She turned away from the spray of ice as the lander touched down. It didn’t matter, did it? There was a lot to be done, and not a lot of time to do it in. But after that—well, there would be more than enough time. And at least she wouldn’t be alone. She wasn’t sure she would have the strength to do this alone.

Romilly watched as TARS connected the inert KIPP to his own power, thinking about the moment when the robot would cross Gargantua’s singularity.

He realized he was jealous of Cooper—not because he was going home, but because he would be there when the quantum data started coming in to see it first—if anything did, in fact, come through. The odds were low, but even the smallest chance made it worthwhile. A chance to revive plan A, sure, but also just to know, to see whatever it was that could reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics, the very big and the very small… how fantastic that would be! Worth all of it, at least to him, after those long years of staring at Gargantua alone.

Knowing the secret was there.

Knowing he could never see it.

KIPP stirred, and Romilly tried to return his attention to the task in front of him.

Even though he knew better, even though he was aware his suit was keeping him at a comfortable temperature, Cooper felt colder as the wind rose into fitful gales, streaming the ice-dust to hiss against their suits and scour the canyon walls. He began to doubt Mann’s prediction that the wind would soon subside.

The doctor was setting a pace that was hard to keep up with, and Cooper found he had dropped back a bit. Mann noticed, and stopped to let him catch up.

“You know why we couldn’t just send machines on these missions, Cooper?” Mann asked.

“Frankly, no,” Cooper panted. He had been wondering that for a while now. TARS or CASE could easily have accomplished what Mann, Miller, and the others had done. Maybe more reliably—TARS might have survived the wave that killed Miller, at least long enough to post a sign on the cosmic bulletin board that said “Keep the hell away from here!”

He caught up, and Mann continued forward.

“A trip into the unknown requires improvisation,” he said. “Machines can’t improvise well because you can’t program a fear of death. The survival instinct is our greatest single source of inspiration.”

He stopped and turned to Cooper, a fish-eye view of the canyon faintly reflected on the glass of his helmet.

“Take you,” he said. “A father. With a survival instinct that extends to your kids—”

“That’s why I’m going home,” Cooper said. “Hopeless or not.”

“And what does research tell us is the last thing you’ll see before you die?” Mann pushed on.

He acted as if Cooper should know the answer to that, but he didn’t have any idea what the scientist was getting at.

What was clear was that the conversation was taking a distinctly morbid turn. He couldn’t blame Mann for having things to get off his chest after what he’d been through—but couldn’t it wait until they were back, comfortable in the lander?

Apparently not, because when he saw that Cooper had no reply, Mann continued.

“Your children,” he said, pausing again. “At the very moment of death, your mind pushes you a little harder to survive. For them.”

Then he started walking again.

Okay, Cooper thought. Maybe Mann had been alone a little too long.

When Murph brought Coop back down the stairs, she found Getty with his stethoscope, listening to Lois’s back, a grim expression on his face. He shook his head and looked up at her.

“They can’t stay here,” he said. Before he could continue, however, another voice cut in.

“Murph?”

It was Tom. He was standing in the doorway, looking confused.

“What is this?” her brother asked.

TWENTY-SEVEN

As KIPP came partly to life, data began fluorescing across his screen. Romilly followed it—at first casually, but then with mounting confusion.

He took his helmet off for a better view.

“I don’t understand,” he murmured.

The canyon lay behind them, and Cooper followed Mann down to a vast plain of ice. He felt dwarfed by it, like a flea on a bed sheet. Wind had striated the ice, carved it into a low relief, almost as if someone had scratched it with their nails.

Lots of someones, actually.

His imagination suddenly summoned an army of thousands of ghostly, ice-colored creatures, defeated in some ancient battle, being dragged off by the victors, their claw-like nails digging futilely into the surface, leaving the marks that remained until the present day…

Back on Earth, he mused, a lot of people used to explain geographic features with such stories—like Paul Bunyan digging the Grand Canyon with his axe. Would it be the same here? Would the kids of plan B call this the “Ghost Scratch Plateau,” or something like that?

Probably. A human landscape was a named one. But would they really retreat to the supernatural, or would science stay with them? Would they wonder, as he did, if it ever rained? How the ice was replaced, once the wind blasted it away? Or was it replaced? Maybe all of this had been formed by some sort of massive upheaval, untold years ago, and was inexorably weathering away…

Brand had said that there would be no such geologic events here on Mann’s world, due to Gargantua, but maybe she was wrong about that. There might not be any asteroid impacts, yet surely there was—or had been—volcanism. Maybe more than usual, what with a dead star constantly tugging at the planet’s crust.

Most of all, he wondered why he was even thinking about it at all. It wasn’t as if he was planning to stay.

“The first window’s up ahead—” Mann said.

Thank God, Cooper thought. Let’s get this over with. Ahead, he saw what Mann was talking about—an opening in the ice. The scientist stepped over to the edge.

“When I left Earth, I felt fully prepared to die,” Mann told him. “But I just never faced the possibility that my planet wouldn’t be the one.” His tone turned regretful. “None of this turned out the way it was supposed to.”

“Professor Brand would disagree,” Cooper said. He peered warily into the depths of the crevasse.

Then he saw movement on the verge of his vision. At first he thought it was Mann going to pat him on the shoulder or something, another of many sympathetic gestures.

Before he could react, however, the scientist ripped Cooper’s long-range transmitter from his collar and tossed it away. He was just turning to ask Mann what the hell he thought he was playing at, this close to a freaking cliff, when Mann lifted his elbow…

…and blasted him with his thruster. The expanding jet of gas sent Cooper off-balance and he slid back. He just managed not to go over the edge.

“What are you doing?” he demanded, still somehow refusing to accept what was actually happening. It was a prank of some kind, surely… But then Mann kicked at him, and his sense of reality snapped back into place.

The scientist was trying to kill him.

Cooper fired his own thrusters to avoid the attack, which sent him plummeting back over the cliff.

Fortunately it wasn’t a sheer drop, but a series of descending shelves, so he landed on the next one down.

Murph watched in horror as Tom placed himself squarely in front of Getty. Her brother’s face was growing redder by the moment.

“They can’t stay here, Tom,” Murph said.

“Not one more day—” Getty began to add, until Tom’s fist punctuated his sentence.

Getty dropped like a sack.

“Tom!” Lois gasped.

Tom turned his angry gaze on Murph.

“Coop,” he said, “get your aunt’s things—she’s done here.”

“Tom,” she pleaded. “Dad didn’t raise you this dumb—”

Then Tom exploded.

“Dad didn’t raise us!” he bellowed. “Grandpa did, and he’s buried outside with Mom, in the ground. I’m not leaving them.”

“You have to, Tom,” she said.

“I’m a farmer, Murph,” he replied. “You don’t give up on the earth.”

“No,” she shouted back, “but she gave up on you! And she’s poisoning your family!”

By the time Cooper pushed himself up to his knees, Mann was almost on top of him.

“I’m sorry,” Mann said. “I can’t let you leave.”

“Why?” Cooper asked, desperately.

“We’re going to need your ship to continue the mission,” Mann said, “once the others realize what this place isn’t.”

And it clicked—all of his uneasiness about this place, Mann’s strange remarks, the too-perfect news about a surface no one had seen.

“You faked all that data?” Cooper asked, incredulous.

“I had a lot of time,” Mann said.

“Is there even a surface?” Cooper asked.

“I’m afraid not.”

Cooper saw the kick coming, but there was nothing he could do about it. It knocked him back and down, but he managed to cling to the edge of the ice shelf.

“I tried to do my duty, Cooper,” Mann said, “but the day I arrived I could see this place had nothing. I resisted the temptation for years—but I knew there was a way to get rescued.”

“You coward,” Cooper snarled. He jerked up his elbow and fired the thruster at Mann. Unprepared, the scientist went sprawling as Cooper scrambled back up onto the shelf. He managed to find his footing before Mann came back, tackling him, and they both went to the ice, clutching and grasping at each other, wrestling on the edge of the abyss.

“Please come with us,” Murph begged her brother as Getty slowly got to his feet, blood trickling from his nose. She had never seen Tom so angry, so irrational. Somehow, she had to calm him down, make him listen to reason.

“To live underground, praying Dad comes back to save us all?” Tom sneered.

“He’s not coming back,” Murph said. “He was never coming back. It’s up to us. To me.”

That was a mistake—she saw it right away.

She wondered, suddenly, if he’d resented her being taken off, educated, treated differently. Being part of their father’s world. Fragments of memory came to her. He’d made comments, now and then—his usual sarcastic remarks—but nothing that had added up to this.

“You’re gonna save the human race, Murph?” Tom rejoined. “Really? How? Our dad couldn’t—”

“He didn’t even try!” she shouted. Then, quieter. “He just abandoned us, Tom.” But she could see Tom’s intractability in the set of his mouth.

Coop handed her the box of her things. He looked so young and earnest, confused.

And sick.

“Tom,” she implored him. “If you won’t come, let them—”

Tom pointed at the box.

“Take your stuff and go,” he said.

She studied it for a moment, the container of things from another life. Then she handed it back to Coop.

“Keep it,” she said. Then she left. Getty came with her, silently nursing his jaw.

Mann lunged at him like a madman, but this time Cooper managed to sidestep and grapple him, throwing him to the ground and pinning him there.

“Stop this!” Cooper shouted, his face mere inches from the scientist’s. Mann’s response was to slam his faceplate into Cooper’s, hard, snapping his head back.

Then again.

And again.

“Someone’s—glass—will—give—way—first!” he grunted between strikes.

“Fifty-fifty you kill yourself,” Cooper howled. “Stop!”

And suddenly Mann did stop. He looked at Cooper with an unreadable expression. His faceplate was already riddled with tiny fractures.

So was Cooper’s.

“Best odds I’ve had in years,” Mann told him, and then he butted his head into Cooper’s glass. Cooper heard it crack, felt the cold first, and then the acrid, nose-scorching scent of ammonia.

Horrified, he rolled away, trying to cover the crack with his glove, only then realizing how big it was.

As he lay there, he was vaguely aware that Mann was bending over him. He felt the burn in his throat now, and his windpipe tried to close, to keep the poisonous atmosphere out of his lungs.

“Please don’t judge me, Cooper,” Mann said. “You were never tested like I was. Few men have been…”

Murph’s throat was tight as she drove away from the farmhouse and back toward NASA.

“You did your best, Murph,” Getty said. He sounded as if he meant it, and she was amazed he could summon that much empathy while nursing his own bleeding nose.

But it wasn’t how she felt. She hadn’t done her best. She’d been glad to be quit of the farm and corn and all of it—as glad as Dad had ever been—to just leave Grandpa and Tom to deal with it. And the result was a chasm between her and her brother, a chasm miles wide and deep and completely invisible to her, until now. Tom was the guy who stayed and did what everyone told him he was supposed to do, working hard at the soil, watching his crops die, watching his children die.

She had followed their absentee father off to save the world in an air-conditioned cave. She had abandoned Tom, too.

Small wonder if he resented her.

But it was Lois and little Coop that would pay the price for what she had done. It was a price they should not have been forced to pay.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Cooper crawled, half blind, across the ice. His face was numb, but his lungs felt like they were on fire. He knew if it wasn’t for the positive pressure from his oxygen supply, he would probably already be unconscious. As it was, the toxic air of Mann’s world was at least slightly diluted.

That wouldn’t help him for long, though. The first black wave of panic was over, replaced by…

“You’re feeling it, aren’t you?” Mann said. “That survival instinct—that’s what drove me. It’s always driven the human race, and it’s going to save it now. I’m going to save it. For all mankind. For you, Cooper.”

Mann got up and began walking away.

“I’m sorry,” he said over his shoulder. “I can’t watch you go through this—I thought I could. But I’m still here. I’m here for you.”

“I’m here for you.” It was the most terrifying thing Mann had said. He’s really doing this, Cooper thought. Mann is really going to let me die. And he thinks he’s being nice about it.

“Cooper,” Mann continued, “when you left, did Professor Brand read you the poem? How does it end?”

Cooper saw him climb back up onto the shelf, and knew he would never have the strength to do the same thing. Even if he did…

“Do not go gentle into that good night,” Mann said.

Cooper remembered of course—the professor’s comforting voice, wishing them farewell as they slipped the shackles of Earth and headed out toward Saturn, the wormhole, the stars beyond. His words had been a guide, a path to follow, a message of hope.

On Mann’s lips they were a eulogy.

More bullshit to make him feel clean about murder.

People had always called Cooper stubborn, but he had always thought of himself more as realistic, and perhaps a bit—persistent. Just now he felt something harden in him and compress, like coal being squeezed into a diamond.

He knew, intellectually, that he was going to die someday. He wasn’t exactly okay with it, but facts were facts. One day, he would, in fact, go into that “good night.” But not today, quietly or any other way. And not by Mann’s hands.

No way.

Wasn’t going to happen.

His mind boiled away everything but what he needed to know, what he needed to see—and then he saw it, just a few feet away.

The long-range transmitter.

Summoning everything he had, he began crawling toward it, even as black spots began to dance before his eyes and his chest felt as if it were going to explode.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Mann looked back down at Cooper, his tortured coughing and choking as clear in his ears as if he were right there. He had wondered if he would feel regret. He supposed it was still too early to tell. Cooper was still trying, still struggling, still somehow hoping to survive. It was the most magnificent thing he had ever witnessed. He wished the pilot could somehow understand why it was necessary.

He turned away and used his jets to return to the higher ground, and then looked back once more at the feebly thrashing figure.

“Cooper,” he said. “Do you see your children yet?”

The only answer was more hacking, and it was all suddenly too much for Mann. It must be so lonely to die, even when someone was with you.

A wave of unanticipated terror swept through him, and he turned off the radio, unable to even listen anymore. Cooper was still moving, a small figure, but at least now he was silent.

Mann put his back to it, and went to do what he must.

Cooper grasped the transmitter, but his gloves might as well have been mittens as he struggled to reconnect it. He tried to slow down, to get it right, but everything was fading, and if he didn’t do it soon, it wouldn’t get done at all.

But he couldn’t do it. Not with the gloves on.

So he pulled them off. He felt the cold again—it struck through his hands and up his arms, encircling his heart, but he could feel; for a few seconds the sensation was energizing. But then everything was shaking, and his fingers wouldn’t stay still…

Then the transmitter clicked into place.

“Brand!” he rasped out. “Brand! Help me! Help…”

And elsewhere, on a dusty plain, Murph knew what she had to do. She wheeled the truck around and floored it.

Brand leapt into the cockpit, Cooper’s fading voice still ringing in her ears. What had happened? Cooper sounded like he was asphyxiating, and she hadn’t heard anything at all from Mann. Was the scientist dead already?

“I have a fix,” CASE said, as the engines cut in.

“Cooper?” she said. “Cooper, we’re coming.”

“No air,” he wheezed. “Ammonia.”

“Don’t talk,” she said. Breathe as little as possible—we’re coming.”

Murph pulled off the road and blew into one of Tom’s cornfields, cutting through it as Getty sat wide-eyed and white-knuckled in the passenger seat. As she watched the corn part around the bumper, she remembered that long-ago day when they had chased the Indian drone, the three of them—Dad, Tom, and her.

The last time they had done anything together. Tom driving, her keeping the antenna fixed, Dad cracking the encryption. They’d been a team, a family.

Only a day later, all of that had been blown to hell. And now, Tom thought she was the enemy.

Well—she was about to be.

Brand tried to keep steady as CASE wove somewhat more than recklessly through the ice formations, avoiding collision sometimes by no more than inches.

It was the same sick feeling in her belly as the one she’d felt when she saw the wave bearing down on them on Miller’s world—the realization that not only was everything they knew not enough, but sometimes it actively hurt them. All of her instincts had told her that a few inches of water was harmless, and that big fluffy clouds were nothing to worry about.

Every assumption they made here was a disaster in the making.

She didn’t know how Mann’s world had deceived them this time, but she hoped desperately that CASE knew what he was doing, where he was going, because Cooper couldn’t have much time left.

In Mann’s pod, Romilly was still trying to comprehend what he was seeing, and not really getting anywhere. He felt a renewed sense of the frustration he’d felt on the Endurance; years alone with the data, talking to himself, on the verge of going crazy—and occasionally maybe veering over that verge.

He remembered what Mann had said about leaving KIPP’s archives intact, the tacit implication being that he didn’t need to bother with them at all. But this… this was intolerable. Why would Mann warn him off, anyway? Had he stored personal data? Had KIPP witnessed and recorded him acting a little crazy? Romilly could understand that. He’d been there himself. But the fact was, there were some fundamental contradictions here that only a scan of the archives could clear up.

Mann would probably never know, and if he did—well, it was far easier to get forgiveness than permission.

“This data makes no sense,” he said to TARS. “Access the archive.”

This is good enough, Murph figured.

She hopped out of the truck, lifted the gas can from the back, and started dousing the cornstalks. She remembered wandering in the fields when she was little, being thoroughly enveloped by them, like being in her own secret maze. She had liked corn, then—the grassy smell of the leaves, the yellow pollen when it tasseled, the ears that appeared almost magically beneath those tufts, swelling daily. The sweet taste of it when it was green, in the milk, before it began to harden into grain.

That had been a real luxury, green corn—a waste of the corn’s full potential to feed humanity’s masses, but an awesome treat for a kid. To her, it would always be the taste of summer, and of her youth. The idea of burning the corn seemed wrong to the point of being sacrilegious.

She was still thinking that when she set it aflame.

Cooper rolled ungracefully onto his back, his eyes fixed skyward, but not seeing anything there.

Do you see your children yet?

He did. He saw Tom, grinning, driving the truck for the first time—and younger, laughing as Donald swung him around in a circle out in front of the house, when there had still been a few scraps of lawn. Before the dust took over. Tom, holding the swaddled figure of Jesse, the grandchild he would never know—could never know, because the boy was years dead before Cooper had even known he existed.

And he saw Murph, a tiny, wrinkled thing in her mother’s arms, a single curl of red hair on her otherwise bald pate. Murph, in the truck, pretending it was an Apollo lander, that the stick was the attitude or thrust controller, depending on what it needed to be at any point in her pretend flight.

Murph later, shifting the gears so he could drink his coffee.

And Murph in her bedroom, looking at the watch he had given her. He saw her throw it away, saw her tear-stained face.

Murph, he thought, as everything blurred. I’m sorry.

Murph gazed at the fire leaping through the corn, stalk to stalk, a living creature, gleeful in its life, as hungry as any new-born thing. Her disgust at what she had done was fading fast—it was the corn that was keeping Tom here, killing little Coop. If burning the corn—if giving the fire life—meant a new life for Coop and Lois, then it was well worth it. Tom would see the smoke. He would come. She didn’t want to be here then.

She climbed back into the truck and headed out.

He would figure out who did it, soon enough. By then she would be long gone, and Lois and Coop along with her.

Brand watched as the cloudscape jetted by, as below them a huge plain opened up uninterrupted and white—except for what appeared to a be a tiny, broken doll lying near the edge of it, next to a deep blue hole.

“I see him,” she told CASE.

Cooper felt rather a hard thud on the ice, and at first thought it was nothing—just the last, random sensation of his dying body. But then he forced his eyes open and, through the wind-whipped ice and his own frozen tears, he saw it. The lander, and someone leaping out of it, elbow-thrusters firing.

Mann’s come back to finish me off, he thought, trying to summon the energy to crawl again. It was no use—his arms and legs might as well have been made of lead.

Then a moment later someone yanked his useless helmet off and he saw Brand’s face through her own glass visor. She shoved something over his nose, and he was suddenly sucking in air—sweet, stale, canned air. That was all he wanted to do, breathe. She had to know.

TARS didn’t seem to be having any luck with KIPP. He turned to Romilly.

“It needs a person to unlock its archival function,” the robot informed him. He shifted a bit so Romilly could reach the data screen and start the procedure. Then he heard a voice—tiny, far off, shouting at him. He looked over and realized it was his helmet.

As he reached for it, KIPP stirred to life.

Romilly lifted the helmet, and the voice grew clearer. Identifiable.

“Brand?” he said. He was struck by how urgent she sounded.

But Romilly never heard the rest.

TWENTY-NINE

Mann struggled across the ice, trying to get his story straight in his mind. He would have to lose his own long-range transmitter, claim Cooper had accidently disengaged it in the fall when Mann had tried to save him.

Should’ve dropped it down the hole, he realized, but he wasn’t going back there now.

He felt the shudder in the ice first, and then the sound and shock blew through him, frozen particles streaking past on the front of the concussion. At first he thought there had been some random shifting in the frozen masses and the ice had broken, but then he saw the black smoke churning from a nearby hilltop.

His hilltop. Where he’d lain so long in exile.

Where KIPP was.

He felt a fresh surge of terror. This was all spinning out of control.

“Dammit, Romilly,” he muttered. He’d warned him, hadn’t he? It wasn’t his fault.

He switched his radio back on. Brand’s voice greeted him.

“Come on, Cooper,” she was saying. “Just a couple more steps…”

Well that tears it, he thought. He had known he would have to deal with Cooper, but he’d hoped to have the others as companions in the mission. Desperately hoped. He didn’t want to be alone again. That was what had broken him, the solitude. If there was any thought that was intolerable, it was to be alone again.

But now he had no choice. There could be no mending this with Cooper. Romilly was certainly dead, and they would blame that on him, too.

Brand…

Still, he could hold onto the fact that this time it wouldn’t be forever. There was still Edmunds’ world, and plan B. He wouldn’t be alone for the rest of his life. Wolf might still be alive, and there was no need for him to know anything about this… unpleasantness. And whether he survived or not, there would be the children. He could take the isolation again, as long as he knew there would be an end to it.

And maybe—once he had some leverage over her—he might be able to salvage Brand. Somehow. No one had a greater stake in this mission than she did. So that it might succeed, she might be made to see the realities.

Before he could appeal to her sense of reason, however, her sense of mission, he had to have the upper hand. Had to hold all of the cards.

He hurried toward the Ranger.

“Brand, I’m sorry,” Cooper wheezed, as soon as the respirator was off of his face. “Mann lied—”

As he spoke, a look of comprehension swept across her face.

“Oh, no,” she gasped.

As Murph roared up to the house, Tom’s truck was nowhere to be seen.

That was as planned—he would be fighting the fire she had set, trying to salvage the crop.

“Keep watch,” she told Getty as she jerked the door open. Then she took off running toward the front door.

“Lois!” she called out as she hit the porch.

“There’s been an explosion,” CASE informed them, as the lander rose and pivoted amid clouds of steam and frost.

“Where?” Brand asked.

“Dr. Mann’s compound,” he replied, as they leapt skyward.

Romilly, Cooper thought. TARS. TARS was with him.

What had Mann done to them?

Mann strapped into the Ranger, gave the systems a quick once-over, and then started the engines. As the ship shot into the air, he felt a sudden, unexpected exhilaration.

This planet had been his prison, and for most of the time he had believed it would be his tomb. It had made him do things he never thought himself capable of doing, and only now did he allow himself to understand how very much he despised it, the hold it had on him. It had been like a mirror held up to him, a mirror which showed him not his face, but his soul, and he hadn’t liked what it showed him.

Yet accepting the darkness in his character was better than dying there. He could live with everything he had done, and everything he was going to do, so long as he didn’t have to go back there. To that planet.

Which he didn’t. It was all over now. Despite the odds, he had escaped. Wherever death finally caught up with him, it would not be on that icy tomb.

It felt good. Like a new start.

But he had to reach the Endurance before the others.

There was nothing to be seen of Mann’s pod but billowing, oily black smoke, and Cooper knew Romilly was dead. Mann’s story about KIPP had been pure bullshit—KIPP had collected data proving the planet was uninhabitable, and Mann had shut him down. He must have also booby-trapped him, in case anyone started prying.

Mann was Professor Brand’s protégé, all right—a liar to the core. But the professor had justified his lies as necessary to save the human race—at least that was how he saw it. Mann had lied only to save himself. Cooper remembered Mann’s comments about how the professor had made himself a monster, made the “ultimate sacrifice,” to tell the world what it needed to be told.

Had Mann really been talking about himself? Was that how he justified all of this, in that diseased mind of his?

Romilly probably never felt a thing, Cooper thought. Thank God.

He and Brand watched the flames, both too sunken in despair to speak.

Suddenly something burst from the smoke. For a horrible moment he thought it was Romilly, burning to death, but then the figure resolved itself into the blocky machine that it was.

TARS.

CASE turned the lander and opened the airlock. TARS leapt in with a dull whump. Then CASE aimed the lander skyward. Only one thing mattered now, Cooper knew.

Who got to the Endurance first.

“Do you have a fix on the Ranger?” he asked CASE.

“He’s pushing into orbit,” the robot replied.

“If he takes control of the ship, we’re dead,” Cooper said.

“He’d maroon us?” Brand asked. She seemed to be having trouble coming to terms with the recent behavior of NASA’s best and brightest.

He remembered the conversation they’d had, before going into hypersleep. It seemed like a very long time ago.

“Scientists, explorers,” she had said. “That’s what I love. Out there we face great odds. Death. But not evil.”

As if for some reason scientists and explorers were incapable of evil. Cortez? Haber, the guy who invented chemical warfare?

“Just what we bring with us then,” he had told her. Well, they had brought it.

The signs had been everywhere. Too bad he hadn’t taken his own comment to heart. If he had exercised even a commonsense amount of suspicion, Romilly would still be alive. And they wouldn’t be racing against hope.

“He is marooning us,” Cooper said.

Lois loved Tom, but she had already lost one child, and she knew her son Coop was sick, and would only get sicker. So Murph didn’t have a hard time convincing her what was best. Now she waited nervously as Lois gathered a few things for her and the boy.

Murph glanced up the stairs.

Would she ever come here again? It didn’t seem likely, however this turned out. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to come back. She remembered happy times here with her dad and brother, with Grandpa and—in her warmest, earliest memories—her mom.

The outside of the house had always looked worn, eroded away, its paint and wood stripped by relentless years of wind and dust. She remembered Grandpa—every day, twice a day, sweeping the porch, trying to keep the dust back. And it had worked—inside the house it had been safe. It had been home.

But now it seemed hollowed out. Maybe it had begun that night when she left her window open, inviting the dust into the house. Within a matter of days, her father had been gone, and nothing was ever right again.

Without Dad and Grandpa there, the house felt like someone she had once known well, but who was now in the last stages of Alzheimer’s. A box that looked familiar, but wasn’t, and never would be again.

And yet there was something she needed to do here. One last thing.

Without really thinking about it, she let her feet carry her up the stairs and through the doorway into her old room. She heard Lois and Coop, already outside with Getty, waiting, knowing that if Tom returned now, the whole plan was doomed.

But something, something told her she needed to be here, now—and not just for Lois and Coop.

“Come on, Murph!” she heard Getty shout. But the pull was like gravity.

She had to go.

As the lander roared toward the eternal night of space, Cooper moved up beside CASE. His throat and nose still stung—for all he knew, the damage might be fatal. His lungs might be about to hemorrhage or whatever, and that would be that. For the moment, however, he was alive, and he was able, so it didn’t make sense dwelling on the worst.

All that mattered was stopping Mann.

He hit the transmitter.

“Dr. Mann?” he said. “Dr. Mann, please respond.”

There was no response. In a way, he was surprised. Mann seemed awfully fond of hearing himself talk, and almost psychotically desperate to justify himself. He must, Cooper guessed, have moved beyond the need for pretty speeches. He was concentrating on reaching the Endurance.

That was probably bad news—it meant that Mann had written them off. And he had too great a lead for them to catch up.

“He doesn’t know the docking procedure,” CASE pointed out.

“The autopilot does,” Cooper replied, thinking about how screwed they were. There was simply no way to beat him there…

“Not since TARS disabled it,” CASE said.

Cooper looked over to the airlock and the singed robot that occupied it. He felt a blaze of newfound respect.

“Nice,” he said. “What’s your trust setting?”

“Lower than yours, apparently,” TARS replied.

“Dr. Mann?” Cooper’s voice came again. Mann ignored him. What point would there be in answering him? Instead he studied the navigation panel.

“Dr. Mann, if you attempt docking—”

Mann switched off the receiver. What he didn’t need now was any sort of distraction. Not when he was this close.

Murph looked around her old room, the room that had once been her mother’s. The bookshelves that had spoken to her. Would they speak to her again? Was her ghost still here?

She waited, but the books remained in their places.

Murph spotted the box of her stuff. Cautiously, as if she feared it might contain a snake, she went to it and looked inside.

THIRTY

Mann breathed a sigh of relief as he came up on the Endurance. According to his instruments, he had a significant lead on the lander, giving him plenty of time to secure his position. He drew up to the larger ship, and then switched on the autopilot so it could finish the tricky business of docking.

“Auto-docking sequence withheld,” the computer said.

Mann blinked at the screen. Why on earth would the docking sequence be withheld?

“Override,” he told the machine.

“Unauthorized,” the computer answered.

Well, that was a problem. He didn’t know the sequence himself—he hadn’t been trained for this. But with the Ranger coming up behind, it didn’t look like he had a choice.

He had to do it manually.

As they climbed into orbit, Cooper could see Mann was in position to dock, but that wasn’t as easy as it might appear. The ring ship wasn’t spinning, but it was still moving in orbit, and Mann had to match that. Getting a general velocity match wasn’t a problem, but it couldn’t just be in the ball park.

He tried the transmitter again.

“Dr. Mann, do not attempt docking,” he said. “Dr. Mann?”

Static was his only reply.

Mann knew he had the closest thing he was going to get to a synchronic orbit, so he left the controls and went quickly to the airlock, which was fast lining up with a hatch on the Endurance. He began working the mechanical grapple, seeking to grip the other ship and keep the two airlocks aligned so they could be coupled.

It was working. The ships bumped together. He was starting a sigh of relief when the computer spoke up again.

“Imperfect contact,” it said. “Hatch lockout.”

Mann paused, thinking furiously.

How perfect does the latch need to be? he wondered. All it has to do is hold together for a few seconds. That was all the time it would take for him to cross. Then he could seal up from the other side. If he had to cut the Ranger loose—well, there was a spare, and another lander, as well. He might lose a little air in the process, sure, yet there would still be plenty, and he would be the only person on board.

He needed to get on board now. The lead he had built was quickly diminishing.

“Override,” he commanded.

“Hatch lockout disengaged,” the computer informed him.

Thank God. He was starting to think he was locked out of everything.

He drifted toward the airlock controls.

So close…

Cooper stared at the joined ships.

Looks like the sonofabitch did it, he thought.

“Is he locked on?” Cooper demanded, knowing CASE had a running telemetry feed from the Endurance.

“Imperfectly,” CASE replied.

Cooper grabbed the transmitter.

“Dr. Mann!” he yelped desperately. “Dr. Mann! Do not, repeat, do not open the hatch. If you—”

Mann looked at the grapples. They were opening and closing, trying to complete the seal, but he knew he didn’t have time to get it perfect. The lander was almost there, and if he lost the partial lock he already had, he might drift off and have to start over again, which would be a disaster. Cooper doubtless knew the docking sequence, and he had both robots at his disposal. He would dock easily, and then he would be in control.

That was not going to happen.

“What happens if he blows the hatch?” Cooper asked CASE.

“Nothing good,” CASE replied.

He considered the tableau. Would Mann go through with it?

Crap—of course he will, Cooper knew. Mann wasn’t really a pilot—KIPP had taken care of that. But whatever flight training the scientist had been through, it wouldn’t have included the skills needed for manual docking. There wouldn’t have been any call for it at any point during the Lazarus mission.

Cooper, on the other hand, had it drilled into him—over and over—that you never, ever open the locks without a perfect seal. Whatever his merits, Mann was—like the rest of them—a theory man. If he thought through the physics of opening the hatch, he probably wouldn’t take the chance—but he wasn’t thinking about that now. His only goal was to get onto the Endurance, and fast.

“Pull us back!” Cooper ordered.

CASE hit the thrusters, and the Endurance began to dwindle in their windscreen.

Then there was silence. Cooper realized he was hardly breathing.

“CASE,” Brand said, snapping out of it. “Relay my transmission to his onboard computer, and have it rebroadcast as emergency P.A.”

Finally, Cooper thought. Brand was back in the game. That was good, because he sure as hell needed her.

“Dr. Mann,” Brand said. “Do not open the in—”

Mann was reaching for the lever to release the inner hatch when Brand’s voice suddenly burst from the computer.

“—peat,” she said. “Do not open inner hatch!”

Startled, he moved over to the transmitter and switched it on.

“Brand,” he said, “I don’t know what Cooper’s told you, but I’m taking control of the Endurance, then we’ll talk about continuing the mission. This is not your survival, or Cooper’s—this is about mankind’s.”

He turned back and pulled the lever.

THIRTY-ONE

It all happened in silence, of course, and at distance, so to Cooper it seemed unreal. It was as if he was watching some of his model spaceships, suspended on fishing line in front of a star field.

First he saw a flare of flame and then a cloud puff from the spot where the two ships were joined, followed by a steady stream of white vapor. He didn’t need to ask what it was—it was air gushing out from both the Ranger and Endurance, crystallizing almost instantly in the vacuum of space.

The loss of air was a problem, but the secondary affect was a disaster. The air in both ships was pressurized at around twelve pounds per square inch, so it was jetting out with enough velocity to act like a steering rocket. As Cooper watched, aghast, the angle of the air stream began turning the wheel that was Endurance—ponderously at first, but with gathering speed, like a pinwheel firework on the Fourth of July. He watched the partially joined airlocks twist and shatter, and then the Ranger was ripped away, tearing itself apart in the process and rupturing one of the Endurance’s modules as it went. Venting more air to freeze in the void, adding more thrust to the ship’s spin.

As it spun, the ghostly hand of planetary gravity took over and the great ship began dropping ponderously toward the frozen planet below.

“Oh, my God,” Brand said.

Cooper got behind the controls and took the sticks, firing the thrusters. He dove beneath the crippled starship, dodging the debris from the Ranger.

“Cooper,” CASE said, “there’s no point in using our fuel to—”

“Just analyze the Endurance’s spin,” he said, cutting CASE short.

“What are you doing?” Brand asked.

“Docking,” Cooper replied.

He pushed the thrusters, trying to match the larger ship’s rotation.

“Endurance rotation sixty-seven, sixty-eight rotations per minute,” CASE informed him.

“Get ready to match it on the retro thrusters,” Cooper said.

“It’s not possible,” CASE argued.

“No,” Cooper said, grimly. “It’s necessary.”

He noticed that the Endurance was shedding bits of itself, sending them spinning off into the void..

“Endurance is hitting atmosphere,” CASE remarked.

“She’s got no heat shield!” Brand said.

Cooper maneuvered beneath the spinning wheel, only feet from the starship. The airlock was there, and relative to the downward fall of the Endurance, the lander was more-or-less motionless.

But that wasn’t even halfway where they needed to be. The dock was whirling around at incredible speed. Speed they were going to have to match.

“CASE, you ready?” he asked.

“Ready.” CASE replied.

Cooper looked again at Endurance, and felt a blink coming on. Maybe CASE was right. They still had the lander. With it, they might manage to limp home. Probably not, but maybe. Yet if this failed, it was all over. They were all dead.

“Cooper,” CASE said, “this is no time for caution.”

Cooper felt a smile on his face.

Right.

“If I black out,” he said, “Take the stick. TARS, get ready to engage the docking mechanism. Brand—hold tight.”

“Endurance is starting to heat—” CASE said.

“Hit it!” Cooper told him.

He felt the retros fire, and the lander started to spin, picking up speed quickly as both ships streaked toward the waiting ice below. The g-forces increased, as well, pushing them against their restraints, trying to crush them. Cooper felt the blood rushing away from his head, and struggled to remain conscious.

They weren’t falling cleanly anymore. The atmosphere was pushing back, and hard, bouncing and yawing the tiny ship. Mann’s planet seemed to be everywhere, and the curve of its horizon was fast straightening out.

He saw TARS open the airlock. The Endurance was still spinning relative to them, but slowly, as they neared matching the rpm. After several heart-stopping moments they lined up, and TARS fired the grapple—but they hit an air pocket—the hatches went out of line and the grapple caught nothing.

He glanced over, saw Brand had passed out, and knew he wasn’t far behind her. He fastened his eyes on his instruments rather than the wild whirling vista of Mann’s planet that was moving into and out of view. He tried to hold on.

“Come on TARS,” he said. “Come on…”

Cooper heard the grapple fire again, and the ship suddenly lurched, violently.

“Got it!” TARS announced.

Immediately CASE reversed the direction of the thrust and their rotation began to slow.

“Gen—gentle, CASE,” Cooper muttered, half out of it.

Mann’s planet began rotating into view less frequently, just once every few seconds, until finally they were barely turning at all.

“Getting ready to pull us up,” Cooper said.

But it might already be too late. They were still falling, and Endurance was starting to burn in earnest, parts melting and sloughing off of her, becoming meteorites that streaked into the atmosphere.

Cooper eased on the main thrusters, fearful of breaking her up.

“Come on,” he said. “You can do it…”

The powerful engine began to slow their fall, but they were so close, so deep in the atmosphere…

The moments stretched, as if they were once again in the grip of the black hole—as if hours or days were dragging by, rather than just a handful of crucial seconds. Cooper felt their fall slow almost glacially, then stop.

And then—finally, painfully, they started back up out of the gravity well that was Mann’s world. The horizon dropped away behind them. Only then daring to breathe, Cooper pulled back on the sticks and allowed himself a silent moment of triumph.

Brand stirred. Cooper turned to CASE, allowing himself a real smile.

“Right.” he said. “And now for our next trick…”

“It’ll have to be good,” CASE informed him. “We’re heading into Gargantua’s pull.”

Dammit! Cooper thought. Some days there just weren’t enough doors to slam. He unbuckled his harness.

“Take her,” he told CASE.

The Endurance was a mess inside. Everything that could tear loose had done so, along with a few things that supposedly couldn’t. Without gravity, the debris swirled around crazily, kicked everywhere by jets of steam and air from as-yet unpatched ruptures in the ship’s hull and fluid circulatory systems.

CASE and TARS went to deal with the worst of those, while he and Brand took inventory of the rest of the ship.

So far as Cooper could tell, the population bomb was still intact and functional. Brand would do a more thorough analysis later. Personally, he found he hated the sight of the thing. It might mean life for the human race, but it represented the death of his children. In fact, it was more than that. The human race was more than a collection of solitary biological organisms. It was the end result of a million years of existence as a species—a million years of stories, myths, relationships, ideas both important and nonsensical, poetry, philosophy, engineering—science.

Being human was to inherit from a parent, a sibling, a family, a community, a town, a culture, a civilization. Humans hadn’t just been biological objects since before they became human.

Sure, he and Brand could bring a few thousand biologically human entities into existence with this thing, but could the two of them really substitute for the immense web of heritage, affiliation—love? Was that really saving the human race? Salvaging a single seed from a forest before it was burnt to the ground didn’t mean you had saved the forest. You could never replicate its baroque, unique ecosystem. Unfreezing human embryos was not going to “save” the human race.

The human race as he knew it was going to die. Whatever came out of this machine, it would be something different. Maybe better, maybe worse—but not the same.

CASE was flagging for his attention.

“We’re slipping towards Gargantua,” the mechanical informed him. “Shall I use the main engines?”

“No!” Cooper said, firmly. “Let her slide as long as we can.” He had been thinking about this. He couldn’t be sure of everything until he had a fine-tuned sense of their status, but he knew already that fighting Gargantua wasn’t going to get them anywhere.

He pushed off and flew to where TARS was welding a bulkhead.

“Give it to me,” he said.

“There’s good news and bad news,” TARS began.

“I’ve heard that, TARS,” he replied. “Just give it to me straight.”

Amelia felt a shiver of dread as Cooper came in. It seemed as if they were trapped in a loop of disasters, one after another. Whatever news he might have, the odds were it couldn’t be good.

She had been trying to stay occupied with the particulars of her duties—primarily making certain that they could still implement plan B. The population bomb had been roughed up enough that she’d needed to overhaul the cryonics, which she had managed to accomplish with a little help from CASE. It was a makeshift fix that required cannibalizing Romilly’s cryo-bed, but then again, he wasn’t going to need it. Once they made planetfall, she could use some parts of the Endurance they still needed to rig a more reliable system. They couldn’t thaw all of the embryos at once—the bomb would need to continue working for decades, at least.

She wondered how many children she and Cooper would be able to manage, now that it was just the two of them. Five? Ten?

At least he had some experience along those lines.

You want a big family, Coop? It was going to be an odd conversation to have. Probably a painful one, too—at least for him.

It all might simply be moot, anyway—the Endurance might not be able to take them anywhere, given the damage she had suffered. And even if she could, what if Edmunds’ planet was no better than the others?

What if “they”—whoever the mysterious architects were—had been playing a cruel joke all along? Or, perhaps worse, hadn’t possessed any real concept of what human beings needed when it came to settling a new home?

If the average person were asked to find a new environment suitable for the chemosynthetic bacteria that lived around deep-sea thermal vents, would they know where to start? And would the difference between such bacteria and Homo sapiens be significant to beings who lived in five dimensions and spoke with gravity? Perhaps not. Some life from Earth would live just fine on either Miller’s planet or Mann’s.

Just not human life. And if they were wrong about two planets—no, strike that—eleven planets, counting those visited by Lazarus astronauts who had found their systems completely wanting—why shouldn’t they be wrong about all of them? If they really knew what they were doing, why couldn’t they have pointed humanity to the one right world for them?

But then she remembered the distorted image in the ship as they passed through the wormhole,—and she couldn’t bring herself to believe that there was any sort of deception involved. And she still had faith in Wolf, in his planet—believed everything she had said that day, trying to persuade Cooper and Romilly that their best course was the one that led to his world.

Edmunds’ planet was where they needed to be. They just had to get there. Which, to her, no longer seemed likely.

She waited for what Cooper had come to say.

He stopped within arm’s reach of her. They were both sealed in their spacesuits, yet it felt very—personal.

“The navigation mainframe’s destroyed,” he said, “And we don’t have enough life support to make it back to Earth.

“But…” he added, “We might scrape to Edmunds’ planet.”

So much had gone wrong that Amelia accepted his words with genuine caution. She tried to read his tone, his expression. She knew this had to be devastating for him, and the relief—no, happiness—that threatened to overwhelm her had to be kept in check. She couldn’t let him see it. Wolf might be alive, or he might be dead. But to know, to know for certain—there was freedom in that.

There was closure, which she desperately needed. If she was to move on with plan B—if that was to be the sum of her remaining life, she needed to know. And if she was wrong about Edmunds’ world—well then, they were done. One way or another, their journey would finally be over. For her, that would be closure of another sort.

As for Cooper, she knew in her heart that no possible outcome would bring him solace. That tinged her inner elation with sadness.

“What about fuel?” she asked, trying to stick to the practical aspects of the situation, to keep her emotions at bay.

“Not enough,” Cooper said. He smiled. “But I’ve got a plan. Let Gargantua suck us right to her horizon—then a powered slingshot around to launch us at Edmunds.” He explained it so easily that he might as well have been talking about taking a ride in a pickup truck. Sure, I’ll just spin the wheel around like this, and downshift ’er…

Yet she knew it wasn’t that easy.

“Manually?” Amelia questioned. Cooper had shown that he was a great pilot, but he was still only human. To slingshot around a black hole—without the mainframe? The tiniest mistake would see them dragged through Gargantua’s horizon and into its singularity.

“That’s what I’m here for,” Cooper said confidently. “I’ll take us just inside the critical orbit.” He said it like he expected her to believe him, and to her surprise, she realized she did. He could do it. And if he couldn’t—well, what the hell. They probably wouldn’t feel a thing, anyway.

“And the time slippage?” she asked softly.

His mouth turned in a melancholy little smile, and she saw traces of his grief.

“Neither of us can afford to worry about relativity right now,” he said, and she saw something else in his expression. A sort of tranquility, as if in his sorrow he had found some kind of peace.

“I’m sorry Cooper,” she said, and hardly thinking about it, she reached to embrace him. They were both in spacesuits, of course, so there was little physical sensation, but it still felt natural. They touched their faceplates together, and the moment seemed to linger.

THIRTY-TWO

Once again they fell toward the Gargantua’s yawning nothingness. In the remaining Ranger, Cooper sat sorting himself, preparing. He watched as TARS separated the lander from the battered Endurance.

He wished he’d had a few more moments with his children. Every second, gold in his hand.

The slingshot effect was nothing new. Comets had been doing it since stars were formed. As for humans, it had been used almost as long as there had been interplanetary travel. Mariner 10 had been the first to employ it, sending the unmanned spacecraft past Venus to explore Mercury, followed by Voyager and Galileo.

You basically sent a spacecraft falling toward a much bigger body—say, a planet. The craft picked up speed as it “fell” toward the planet, whipped around it in a very tight pass, and then used the speed it had gained falling toward the planet to escape its gravitational pull, moving on a very different trajectory. And since the planet was in motion, the spacecraft could pick up the planet’s orbital speed, adding it to its own velocity. In this way you both changed course and increased speed toward another, final target without ever having burned an ounce of fuel.

That was what Cooper intended to do with Gargantua.

Of course, Gargantua wasn’t a planet, or even—in the conventional sense—a star. And if it hadn’t been—as Romilly put it—a “gentler” black hole, they would never have had a chance.

As Romilly had said—and as his twenty-odd years of notes had meticulously measured and elucidated—Gargantua rotated, which meant that it dragged space-time along for the ride. A slingshot was entirely plausible, but a bit more… complicated than zipping near a planet.

Cooper checked everything for the umpteenth time, hoping Romilly hadn’t gone more than a little looney while he was alone. Because Gargantua wasn’t going to grant him the slightest clemency for even the tiniest mistake.

Back in the Endurance, Amelia watched the lander come loose and shift orientation as Cooper and TARS prepared the maneuver.

Cooper’s voice came over the radio.

“Once we’ve gathered enough speed around Gargantua, we use Lander One and Ranger Two as rocket boosters to push us out of the black hole’s gravity,” he explained, as the lander reattached in the rear of the ring module, blocking her view of the Ranger and Cooper.

“The linkages between landers are destroyed,” Cooper said. “So we’ll control manually. When Lander One’s fuel is spent, TARS will detach—”

“—and get sucked into the black hole,” TARS finished.

Amelia thought they were joking at first. They did a lot of that, TARS and Cooper. Sometimes she wanted to change the humor settings on both of them. But it crept over her that this time there wasn’t any humor involved.

“Why does he have to detach?” she asked.

“We have to shed mass if we’re gonna escape that gravity,” Cooper explained.

“Newton’s third law,” TARS put in. “The only way humans have ever figured out of getting somewhere is to leave something behind.”

Doyle, Amelia thought, Romilly, Mann, her father—and now TARS? How much loss could she take?

“Cooper,” she said, feeling a little desperate, and even a little indignant. “You can’t ask TARS to do this for us—”

“He’s a robot, Amelia,” Cooper shot back. “I don’t have to ask him to do anything.”

“Cooper,” she snapped. “You asshole!”

“Sorry,” Cooper said. “You broke up a little over there.”

She was ready to launch into a full-blown tirade, but TARS interceded.

“It’s what we intended, Dr. Brand,” TARS said. “It’s our last chance to save people on Earth. If we can find some way to transmit the quantum data I’ll find in there, they might still make it.” The robot’s calm, reasonable tone checked her anger.

“If there’s someone still there to receive it,” she allowed, feeling emptier than ever.

Was it possible? Did it even make sense? It was hard to know anymore. But it was a better chance than nothing, and Cooper was probably right about shedding mass. Maddeningly, he was seldom wrong about such things.

But if there was a way to prove her father wrong, to redeem plan A, they had to take it. It just seemed so wrong that TARS had to be the one to make the sacrifice. It should be her, but it was too late for that—Cooper had seen to it, she realized. And—to be fair—neither the robots nor Cooper knew enough about the population bomb. If glitches developed, if improvisation was required, she had to be there. Seen logically, it should be TARS who did this, and not her.

But it was still hard to watch from safety as someone else paid her bills.

As the engines pushed them forward, ever faster, the ship began to shudder.

Amelia tightened her harness and tried not to revisit what would happen if Cooper was even slightly wrong in his calculations. They were so close now that all she could see was a massive Stygian ocean wreathed in golden, glowing gas. It seemed impossible they were going to escape as they fell, faster and faster, that this ancient dead god would let them slip his greedy, immortal grasp. Nothing as frail and mortal as the Endurance stood a chance in the face of such cosmic hunger. Even if they made it past perigee—their nearest approach to the black hole—they would surely break up on the way out.

But she had to believe—had to believe that Cooper could pull it off.

And, so suddenly, they were there, at the bottom of their fall. At least she hoped it was the bottom.

“Maximum velocity achieved,” CASE announced. “Prepare to fire escape thrusters.”

“Ready,” TARS said.

“Ready,” Cooper echoed.

Amelia couldn’t tear her eyes from the impossible horizon, the black-hearted monster that lay below them.

“Main engine ignition in three, two, one, mark,” CASE intoned.

The hull thrummed as the main engines fired, adding to the inertia already whipping them around Gargantua, turning the black hole’s gravity against it in a demonstration of stellar jujitsu. But the giant wasn’t giving up without a fight. Endurance strained to its limits for freedom, like a four-wheel drive trying to climb out of a sandy hole with the wheels spinning and the slope sliding backward.

Inertia wasn’t enough. Nor were the main engines.

More thrust was needed.

“Lander One,” CASE continued, “engines on my mark… three, two, one, mark—”

“Fire,” TARS said, and the lander’s engines engaged. The Endurance protested even more, her metal skeleton audibly straining as the small craft emptied it fuel reserves in one massive, maximum burn.

“Ranger Two, engines on my mark,” CASE said. “Three, two, one, mark.”

“Fire,” she heard Cooper say.

Amelia saw the stars again as they pulled away from Gargantua, toward the grand spectacle of the night sky, so much brighter than that of the solar system. And somewhere out there—outshone by nebulae and pulsars and blaze of the stellar newborn—there was the faint red dot for which they were aiming.

Edmunds’ planet.

Unbelievably, the powered slingshot seemed to be working. The tipping point was still ahead, but they were approaching it.

“That little maneuver cost us fifty-one years,” Cooper reported.

“You don’t sound bad for a hundred and twenty,” Amelia responded, a little giddy with reaction.

“Lander One, prepare to detach on my mark,” CASE said. “Three…”

She could see the lander, TARS at the controls, and her brief cheerfulness vanished as quickly as it had come. The lander’s fuel was spent, and now it was just dead weight. As was TARS.

Space required a certain parsimony of thought. Something was either useful, or it was dead weight, and if it was dead weight you dropped it. They had been shedding weight since the first stage booster detached while they were still in Earth’s atmosphere. Like TARS said, you had to leave something behind.

Was that how her father had felt about Earth, and the rest of the human race? Were they dead weight that had to be dropped, so that a handful could move on?

But TARS wasn’t dead weight.

TARS was TARS. He had a humor setting…

“Two one, mark,” CASE said.

Through the cockpit window, she saw TARS moving.

“Detach,” he said.

And the lander dropped away.

“Goodbye, TARS,” she said.

“See you on the other side, Coop,” TARS said optimistically.

Amelia frowned. What was that supposed to mean? Something about the way had TARS said it…

The lander had spent its velocity and begun to fall toward the black hole.

“CASE?” she heard Cooper say. “Nice reckless flying.”

“Learned from the master,” the robot replied. The Ranger’s engines sputtered and went out as it, too, exhausted its fuel.

“Ranger Two,” CASE said, “prepare to detach.”

For an instant she thought she had misheard, but then she looked up at Cooper’s face and the faint apology written on it.

“No!” she shouted, grasping for the buckles of her harness.

“On my mark,” CASE said.

Free of the restraint, she pushed herself to the window, staring at Cooper, pleading with her eyes.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Newton’s third law,” he said. “You have to leave something behind.”

“…two…” CASE said.

She pushed her faceplate against the window, trying to somehow bridge the vacuum separating them.

“You told me we had enough resources for both of us!” she said.

“…one,” CASE continued.

Cooper smiled at her fondly.

“Hey,” he told her. “We agreed—ninety percent.”

“Mark,” CASE said.

She saw him reach for the button, watching through the jewels of her tears, forming perfect orbs inside her helmet, drifting, collecting in her eyelashes.

He looked at her one last time, then hit the button.

“De—” he began, and he swallowed. “Detach.”

And the Ranger—and Cooper—were gone.

THIRTY-THREE

Cooper watched the Endurance’s main drive diminish to a star-like point of light as the ship accelerated away from Gargantua, and he fell toward the massive dead blackness. His breath quickened as he wondered what it was going to feel like—if it was going to feel like anything at all, for that matter.

He peered at the horizon, at the distorted light of the last stars—the last light—he thought, that he would ever see. Glancing upward, however, he saw the universe as if through a circular window, a porthole opening onto infinity.

There is a beauty to this, he thought, as he watched a glowing plasma jet stream across his field of view. He had never known he could hold terror in one hand and wonder in the other with such perfect balance. And indeed, as the fall sped up, terror began to overbalance a bit.

Trying to keep from hyperventilating, Cooper turned the Ranger down, gasping at the flare of the horizon.

“TARS?” he asked. “Are you there?”

His only answer was static as he watched the lander nose down into the black.

Then Cooper realized he was losing his fight with panic. He’d hoped to go out with some dignity, but now it was all he could do not to scream.

Far above, Amelia heard Cooper’s breathing. It was becoming louder and louder. Crying, she balled her fists so tight her nails cut into her palms.

And then, abruptly—as his harsh breaths rose toward a crescendo—the radio dimmed out and fell silent.

She stared out into space, the last surviving human crew of the Endurance. Gargantua still filled her field of vision, but every breath she took put thousands of miles between her and the black hole.

For a long time she could not look away. But at last—as she knew she must—Amelia turned from her grief, from what lay behind her, and looked ahead to the distant red orb that was now her destination.

Looking toward hope.

“It’s totally black,” Cooper said, knowing probably no one could hear him. “No light at all.” He paused. “Brand? Can you hear me?”

Murph stood in her room, the ruddy light of dusk fading beyond the window pane.

She sat on the bed and looked into the box. She took out the model of the lunar lander, remembering a little ruefully how she had punched that kid for saying the Apollo missions were faked—but even now, not really regretting it or the larger fistfight that followed.

She looked up at the books.

“Come on Murph!” she heard Getty yell from outside. “We don’t have much time.”

Cooper saw something coming out of the darkness, something glittering and white, like a handful of sand cast by a giant into a whirlwind. As the Ranger plunged into it, it streamed by like glowing diamonds, like sleet seen through high-beams. It was beautiful and terrifying, becoming more the latter as it began to beat against his hull. The entire ship shuddered as the hail became more like red-hot rivets, shredding the Ranger to pieces.

“Fuel cell overload,” his computer informed him. “Destruction imminent. Initiate ejection.”

Into that? his inner voice squeaked. But he didn’t have a choice in the matter, and for the second time in his life he saw the controls ripped involuntarily from his hands, and he was blown out of the Ranger as it broke into a line of explosions running down the infinite rabbit hole, with him right behind. And then Cooper finally screamed, because his mind couldn’t take it, and all that was left was the part of him that couldn’t think but could only react, the part as old as the first primate, the first mammal, the first water-bound worm with a notochord.

Then, without warning, something like a great invisible hand seemed to take him, pull him to the side, away from the stream of debris. And toward—something. Something that somehow didn’t seem to belong here. A grid of some sort—an infinite series of cubbyholes, each square opening nearly identical…

No, not cubbyholes—tunnels, he realized, as without slowing in the slightest he hurtled feet first into one, banging painfully into the side. Still hollering, he began kicking at whatever the walls were made of, and felt some of it give, slowing his fall. It was as if the passage was made of unmortared bricks. It was weirdly familiar, and nothing like what he’d thought he would find in a black hole.

He kicked again, and added his arms and it gave even more. At the same time he sloughed off more of his forward momentum.

He kept at it and slowed further, coming, at last, thankfully, to a stop. For the moment, all was finally calm—no more falling, no more motion at all—just floating in a strange space that seemed more familiar each moment. He had time to wonder if he was dead, or dreaming, or just stuck at the event horizon of the black hole, frozen in time, his mind playing out weird fantasies as it would for the rest of time.

Putting aside the possibilities that he was dead or dreaming—he couldn’t do anything if either was true—he reached out to the wall of the passage. If this was actually happening, then where the hell was he? How could a transdimensional space inside of a black hole be made of bricks?

But they didn’t look like bricks.. For one thing, they were thinner than most bricks, and not as dense. Each had two thick outer edges enclosing hundreds of much thinner lines, like paper…

Like books…

If you were on the wall side of a bookshelf. And from each book streamed a ghostly line of light, as if each book had left a trail. The light created a vast matrix around him, going off in all directions.

He pushed at one of the objects, and it shifted incrementally. He pushed harder, and then harder until finally it popped through and dropped out of sight.

Peering through the gap he saw her. She was ten and her hair was wet. She had a towel around her neck, and she was just turning, startled by the book falling.

“Murph?” he called. “Murph?”

But she didn’t react. She just stood there, gazing at the shelves, at the book on the floor, which he could no longer see. Then she came cautiously toward the shelf and bent down. When she came up she was holding a broken toy.

The lunar lander.

In the twilight, Murph turned the lander model in her hand, remembering, wondering. Outside, Getty was sounding more frantic. But she felt somehow, there was something here.

Cooper watched his ten-year-old daughter examine the broken model.

“Murph!” He tried again. “Murph!”

But she still didn’t hear him. She turned and left the room, and he knew where she was going—to the breakfast table, where he would chastise her for being unscientific and not taking care of “our stuff.”

Desperately, he looked around and realized that he was in something like a cube, and each wall of the cube looked into Murph’s room from a different angle, as if the room had been turned inside out, reversed, and put back together. And it wasn’t just the one room, the one bookshelf. He saw now the matrix of light held multiple iterations of the room, maybe infinite, tunnels and passages going in every direction, framed, held together by the light streaming from the books, the walls, the objects in the room.

It was disorienting, and he wished Romilly was there to explain to him what was going on. He had to be operating in more than three dimensions, but since his mind was only built to handle three—well, he figured it was doing its best.

He was still in free-fall. By floating around and using his thrusters, he could effectively move to each iteration of Murph’s room, so he pulled himself to the next one and punched out two more books.

Through the resulting gap he saw an empty bedroom. It didn’t stay empty for long, though. The door opened and—well—he walked in. His younger self, looking bothered about something. A moment later, Murph entered as well.

Cooper slammed into the books, kicked another out, furiously determined to get their attention.

Murph rubbed her hand across the old desk, remembering all those years ago when she had pushed it in front of the door, how angry and sad she had been. She reached for the chair, too, and tilted it back.

Cooper watched Murph put the chair on top of the desk, completing her barricade of the door. A moment later, he saw it move a little as someone—no, not someone, but him, the earlier him—began to nudge through.

“Just go,” Murph said. “If you’re leaving—just leave now.”

Cooper spun around to another wall, and saw his earlier self on the other side of the door.

“Don’t go, you idiot!” he yelled, as the other Cooper closed the door. Going to let Murph cool off. Precisely the wrong move. “Don’t leave your kids, you goddamn fool!” he shouted.

He began punching at the walls with everything in him, but not blindly. He knew what to do.

“S,” he said. “T…”

Murph was watching now. She didn’t look scared. She looked amazed, excited, interested.

“A,” he grunted. “Y.”

He stopped to catch his breath, then watched in frustration as his earlier self reached through the cracked door and around, to lift off the chair so he could push back the desk and enter the room.

“Stay, you idiot!” he yelled. “Tell him, Murph! Stay…”

He watched numbly as it played out, just like before. He gave her the watch. She hurled it across the room.

“Murph,” he pleaded. “Tell him again! Don’t let him leave…”

He broke down and began to cry, the sheer frustration of having to watch it all, and not be able to do anything. It was way too much to handle. Once again, he wondered if he was dead. If this was Hell.

Because it damn sure felt like it.

Murph picked up her old notebook and paged through it, stopping when she reached her Morse code interpretation of the gaps in the books.

Stay.

She looked up from the notebook back to the books, and felt something almost like a rush of wind go through her, as if some hidden place had suddenly been opened. She went to the shelves, and began pulling books out.

The smell of burning corn drifted up from downstairs, where the door stood open for her.

“Murph,” Cooper sobbed. “Don’t let me leave.”

But his earlier self turned, heading for the door.

“Stay!” he screamed, slamming the books with all of his might. One dropped, and the earlier Cooper turned. Looked at it…

And left.

Cooper put his head against the books, weeping.

Murph stared at the gaps she had made in the books, and then back at her notebook. Her throat tightened.

“Dad,” she said. “It was you. You were my ghost…”

Tears started, not from pain or anger or sadness, but from the greatest joy she had felt in many, many years. He hadn’t abandoned her. He had tried. He had been her ghost all along.

Cooper was still crying when he heard his name. He turned, but there was no one there, and he realized the voice had come from his radio. He also recognized the voice.

TARS.

“You survived,” Cooper said.

“Somewhere,” TARS agreed. “In their fifth dimension. They saved us.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” he asked. “And why would they help us?”

“I don’t know,” TARS admitted, “but they constructed this three-dimensional space inside their five-dimensional reality, to allow you to understand it.”

“It isn’t working!” Cooper exploded.

“Yes, it is,” TARS said. “You’ve seen that time here is represented as a physical dimension. You even worked out that you can exert a force across space-time.”

Cooper frowned, trying to understand. And then, suddenly, he did. The streams of light from the books were paths. Through time. Showing where each thing in Murph’s room had come from and where it was going. And the force he was exerting…

“Gravity,” he said. “To send a message…”

He looked around the infinite tunnels, the infinite Murphs, the lines from the books, the shelves, everything in the room going off as far as he could see in any and every direction.

“Gravity crosses the dimensions, including time,” he said.

When he pressed an icon on a control panel, it wasn’t the icon that made the ship move. It was just something that translated his intention to the mechanisms that could actually start the ship. Similarly, although it felt as if he was punching the books out with his fists and feet, in fact that was not possible. His physical body, this physical body was not—could not be—in the past.

But gravity could. Like TARS said, gravity cut across and through all of the dimensions. When he punched at one of them, what he was really doing was sending a pulse through space-time, a gravitic surge that was responsible for moving the books.

In other words, he was the source of a gravitational anomaly, and “they” had given him control of it in the most natural way possible—by making his sense of self, his sense of body, the controller. By giving images—icons—that he could understand and exert that force upon.

He realized suddenly that there might be a point to this. Something beyond watching himself make the biggest mistake of his life, over and over again. He just had to understand the tools he had been given, and determine what to do with them.

He pulled himself back to the wall and started counting books.

“You have the quantum data now,” Cooper said to TARS.

“I’m transmitting it on all wavelengths,” TARS confirmed, “but nothing’s getting out.”

“I can do it…” Cooper breathed.

He reached for one of the timelines—worldlines, really, he mused—and plucked at it. To his delight, a wave ran up the line, like a guitar string vibrating, affecting that book slightly, wherever and whenever it was.

“Such complicated data,” TARS said. “Sending it to a child…”

“Not just any child,” Cooper said.

Murph stood in the darkening room, looking at her notebook, puzzling at it. She knew there must be more now. An answer…

Her father had been here, as the ghost.

Where is he now?

“Murph!” Getty hollered, sounding more frantic than ever. “Come on!”

THIRTY-FOUR

Cooper saw Murph staring out the window, and knew his earlier self was driving away. Toward NASA, the Endurance—this.

“Even if you communicate it here,” TARS reasoned, “she wouldn’t recognize its significance for years…”

He began to become angry. After all the fear and frustration, the feelings that burned up through him provided a welcome change.

“Then figure something out!” he snapped. “Everybody on Earth is going to die!”

“Cooper,” TARS said, “They didn’t bring us here to change the past.”

Of course they didn’t. Cooper paused, calming himself. No, he couldn’t change the past. But there was something else… something about what TARS was saying.

They didn’t bring us here to change the past.

They…

“We brought ourselves here,” he said, and he pushed off, found another angle, saw the room in a slightly different moment. It was full of dust from the storm, the storm that had come upon them at the baseball game. Murph had left her window open…

“TARS,” he said, studying the dust. “Feed me the coordinates of NASA in binary.”

And with his fingers, he traced the pattern, the lines he had found after the dust storm—

She ran her finger along the windowsill and examined the dust on it, remembering the pattern on the floor that day, how happy she was that she had been vindicated, that her father believed her. Sort of. But he had never believed all of it. Only the part he wanted to believe, that part that said he had been chosen to go into space. The ghost he had discounted.

And yet he was the ghost. Both. Giving himself the coordinates that would lead him to NASA, but also telling himself to stay.

A contradiction. Like gravity itself.

She looked around the room, searching for something to reconcile it. This was her last shot. Tom would never let her in here again.

“Come on, Dad,” she pleaded. “Is there something else here?”

Cooper looked up from the pattern he was tracing.

“Don’t you see, TARS?” he said. “I brought myself here. We’re here to communicate with the three-dimensional world. We’re the bridge.”

He moved along to another version of the room. Murph was there, jumping up from the bed, grabbing the watch from where she had thrown it, running out the door…

Murph reached into the box and picked up the watch, thinking about the little moment of hope, the little experiment she and her father were going to do together, until she realized just how long he was going to be gone, that he didn’t even know if he was coming back. And then she had thrown it, rejected him and his damn attempt at “making things right.”

Then she had picked it up again. And kept it. And waited. And he hadn’t returned. They had never been able to compare them.

She put it on the bookshelf.

The second hand twitched.

Cooper pushed himself along the lines of the books, following their positions in time.

“I thought they chose me,” Cooper said. “They never chose me. They chose Murph.”

“For what?” TARS asked.

“To save the world!” Cooper replied.

He watched ten-year-old Murph come back into the room, crying her eyes out, holding the timepiece. It was hard to watch, but he did.

After a moment she put the watch on a shelf.

Murph sighed and put the box on the shelf. If there had ever been anything else here, it was gone now. She had to salvage what she could. And right now that meant saving Lois and Coop.

Cooper was “moving” fast now, following the room through space-time. Watching it go from being Murph’s bedroom, to abandoned, to glimpses of what might be a little boy, although he never got a clear view.

“‘They’d have access to infinite time, infinite space,” he told TARS, gesturing all around him. “But no way to find what they need. But I can find Murph and find a way to tell her—like I found this moment…”

“How?” TARS asked.

“Love, TARS,” he said. “Love, just like Brand said. That’s how we find things here.” Love, like gravity, which could move across time and dimensions.

Brand had been spot on.

“So what are we to do?” TARS asked.

Cooper looked down the time dimension. The books? No, and not the lander. But the watch, on the shelf, as far as he could see…

“The watch,” he realized. “That’s it. She’ll come back for it.”

“How do you know?” TARS asked.

And again he felt the certainty, a pull as strong as a black hole. Stronger—it was like the pull that had brought him here. That would bring Murph back, too.

“Because I gave it to her,” he said, excitement building. He scrutinized the watch for a moment. It would have to be simple, binary, or…

He had it.

“We use the second hand,” he told TARS. “Translate the data into Morse, and feed it to me.”

He grabbed the timeline that connected to the second hand in all of its iterations, and as the data came in he tugged it in time, long and short—dots and dashes.

“What if she never came back for it?” TARS asked.

“She will,” he insisted, as the second hand began flicking back and forth. “She will. I can feel it…”

Murph was turning to leave when Getty shouted—near hysterically—that Tom was coming. But still something held her. She went back to the box, knowing what she was going for, and pulled out the watch. Feeling it, then seeing it.

“Murph?” Getty yelled. “Murph!”

When she came tearing out of the house, Getty was holding a tire iron, watching an angry Tom climb from the truck, black with soot. Lois and Coop were watching, too, fearful looks on their faces.

But Murph ran straight for her brother.

“Tom,” she said. “He came back… he came back.”

Tom’s fierce expression tempered a bit toward puzzlement.

“Who?” he asked, gruffly, confusion wrestling with anger in his voice.

“Dad,” she told him. “It was him. He’s going to save us.”

Triumphantly she held up the watch—and its weirdly flickering second hand.

Murph looked at the equations she had just written, then back to the watch. She stood, gathering the pages, and hurried through the halls. In her haste she bumped into someone, and was absently aware that it was Getty, but she didn’t slow her pace.

She remembered her first time here, with her dad, how terrifying it had been, followed quickly by awe-inspiring. Now, after all these years, it was home.

She reached the launch bay, the gigantic cylindrical space station that had never been intended to fly, had been nothing more than busy work to keep everyone who knew the truth from curling up into a ball and staying that way.

She remembered the pride Professor Brand had showed in the thing, even though he believed it would never function.

She walked up to the railing, marveling at it, at the thousands of workers who were still on the job. Getty stepped up beside her, having followed, and he wore a curious look on his face.

Then she turned back to the enormous hollow, and shouted at the top of her lungs.

“Eu-RE-ka!”

She turned her grin on Getty.

“Well, it’s traditional,” she said. Then she threw her papers over the railing.

“Eureka!” she repeated, as the papers fluttered down and workers looked curiously at her.

Then she planted a kiss right on the lips of a very surprised and confused Dr. Getty.

Cooper gazed along the worldline of the watch, saw that it seemed to branch out infinitely.

“Did it work?” he asked TARS.

“I think it might have,” TARS replied.

“Why?” Cooper said, hopefully.

“Because the bulk beings are closing the tesseract,” TARS replied.

Cooper gazed again off into the distance and saw that something, at least, was happening. The lines were becoming sheets, becoming bulks, as the three-dimensional representation created for his only-human brain unraveled and returned to its full five-dimensional reality. It was like the universe was collapsing in on him, which he supposed in a sense it was.

“You don’t get it yet, TARS?” Cooper asked. “‘They’ aren’t beings—they’re us. Trying to help, just like I tried to help Murph…”

“People didn’t build this tesseract,” TARS said.

“Not yet,” Cooper replied. “But one day. Not you and I, but people—people who’ve evolved beyond the four dimensions that we know.”

As the expansion back into five dimensions came upon him, Cooper thought of Murph, and Tom—and hoped he had saved them. He thought he had, or at least played a part. There wasn’t much more that he could ask.

“What happens now?” he wondered aloud.

But then he was swept away, as if by a massive wave, like the Ranger back on Miller’s world. But that wave had only lifted and dropped him. No, this was more like a fast-moving river.

Or a riptide.

In the current, and beyond it, he saw stars and planets being born, dying, decaying into particles, then being born again, faster and faster—through space-time, above space-time, a piece of paper bending, a pen poking a hole through it…

Where was he going now? He was done, wasn’t he? He’d accomplished what he was meant to do—it was up to Murph now. And Brand.

He wondered where Brand was, how she was doing. He wished he could explain to her why he’d had to leave her alone.

Ahead he saw a glassy, golden distortion, and in it the Endurance, and for a split second he thought his wish had brought him to her—but then he saw that this Endurance was like new, undamaged, just entering the wormhole. He drifted through the bulkhead and saw Brand and Romilly there, both strapped in.

Brand, he thought, reaching toward her. In a way, he had gotten his wish. Could he communicate with her? Probably not, or at least nothing important, since this was the past, and she hadn’t known that any of this was going to happen.

To his surprise, she saw him. She reached her hand up to his, and he realized there was something he could communicate. Something that maybe was important. So he reached back, hoping to feel the warmth of her hand, give it an affectionate squeeze. But when their fingers came together they mingled, distorting each other but not really touching. A quiet moment in the chaos.

He watched her face, the wonder on it.

Then, abruptly, he was swept on. The sulfurous orb of Saturn suddenly loomed immense in his vision…

Then quiet.

THIRTY-FIVE

Cooper opened his eyes to the crack of a baseball bat, a faint breeze and gauzy sunlight. He blinked, trying to get his bearings.

He was no longer in a spacesuit. He lay in bed, tucked into crisp white sheets. The bed was in a room, and the room had a window that looked, not into space—but into light. The view was obscured by net curtains, but he could hear children laughing beyond it.

“Mr. Cooper?” someone asked. “Mr. Cooper?”

He looked up and found a young man with a pronounced chin and green eyes staring down at him. At his side was a woman with black hair in a ponytail. He didn’t know either of them, but as his brain picked up a little speed he saw that they were dressed in medical clothing—and he realized the bed was a hospital bed.

He sat up, trying to remember. He had seen Brand, and then had the stuffing knocked out of him. And Saturn…

He had been pitched back into the space around Saturn, two years from Earth and any possible rescue.

So why wasn’t he dead?

“Take it slow, sir,” the man—a doctor, he saw now—cautioned. “Remember you’re no spring chicken anymore.” He smiled. “I gather you’re—” The doctor referred to the chart in his hand. “—one hundred and twenty four years old.”

Cooper didn’t feel any older than when he’d left.

Time slippage, he thought.

“You were extremely lucky,” he continued. “The Ranger found you with only minutes left in your oxygen supply.”

Rangers? Around Saturn? Why? Had there been another expedition?

“Where am I?” he asked.

The doctor looked a little surprised, but then went to the window and pulled back the curtains.

There was no sky, only the upper curve of a huge cylinder, with upside-down houses, trees, fields, and pools. Cooper followed what he could of the curve as it continued down, realizing it went beneath him. And he knew had seen this before, or something becoming this. Back at NASA, in the mountain.

“Cooper Station,” the doctor said. “Currently orbiting Saturn.”

Cooper struggled to get up and the nurse came to his aid, helping him stand and walk slowly over to the window. Outside, beneath the topsy-turvy sky, some kids were playing baseball. As he watched, one swung like the devil and hit a pop fly. He tracked it as it flew up, slowing, pausing—then speeding up again as it crossed the station’s axis and continued on. The kids shouting warnings as the ball shattered a skylight literally on the other side of the world.

“Nice of you to name the place after me,” he said, as the ball players laughed at their faux pas.

The nurse giggled. But when he looked, he could see that it wasn’t at the ball players, and the doctor was giving her a look.

“What?” he asked.

“The station wasn’t named after you, sir,” the doctor said. “It was named after your daughter.”

Cooper smiled at his mistake.

Of course it was.

“Although, she’s always maintained how important you were,” the man added quickly.

That brought up a question Cooper had to ask, but he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to know the answer. If he was a hundred and twenty-four—if eighty-odd years had passed since he left Earth…

“Is she… still alive?” he asked.

“She’ll be here in a couple of weeks,” the doctor confirmed. “She’s really far too old for a transfer from another station, but when she heard you’d been found—well, this is Murphy Cooper we’re talking about.”

“Yes,” Cooper marveled, “it is.”

“We’ll have you checked out in a couple days,” the doctor assured him. Then he and the nurse left Cooper alone.

Plan A, he mused, looking out at the fantastical station—Professor Brand’s busy-work come to a fruition the old man had never himself believed would occur.

Freakin’ plan A.

The administrator was very organized and very perky and—young. Thirty at most, with no hint of grey in his curly black hair.

“I’m sure you’ll be excited to see what’s in store,” he told Cooper, leading him along a walkway inside of a hangar. “We’ve got a nice situation for you.”

Cooper’s gaze found a row of Rangers—not the ones he had flown, but a new generation, even sleeker than before. Lovely to look at. How different were they, he wondered? He would love to climb into one, have a look at the controls. Were they propelled by some sort of gravity drive, as the station must be?

But his guide never even glanced at the handsome vessels. That wasn’t where they were going.

“I actually did a paper on you in high school, sir,” the fellow said. “I know all about your life on Earth…” They entered what would have been a quite ordinary town square had it not been in orbit around Saturn.

“So when I made my suggestion to Ms. Cooper, I was delighted to hear she thought it was perfect.”

Cooper stopped, staring, at a farmhouse. No, scratch that. The farmhouse, his house, the same porch where he and Donald drank beers in the evening. The place where his kids were born, where Murph had turned her back to him.

But cleaner—it looked like they had painted it.

As he drew nearer, a monitor came to life, and an old man appeared on it.

“May 14th” the image said. “Never forget. Clear as a bell. You’d never think…”

Now Cooper saw another man’s face, also old.

“When the first of the real big ones rolled in,” he said, “I thought it was the end of the world.”

“Of course,” Cooper’s guide said, “I didn’t speak to her personally.”

“Sure, my dad was a farmer…” the monitor continued, this time a woman’s voice, quavering with age, but then they were in the house, the door closing off the narration. Another screen woke as they entered the kitchen, more old people talking about the dust, Cooper realized.

His house was now a museum exhibit.

“But she confirmed just how much you loved farming,” the administrator finished, proudly.

“She did, huh?” Cooper said. Well, the least Murph deserved was a little joke at his expense. So he was going to live in a museum, and be its chief exhibit? Do a little hobby-farming to show the kids?

He noticed one thing in the house that didn’t fit the pastoral scene in the least—a robot, quite familiar in form.

“Is that…?”

“The machine we found near Saturn when we found you, yes,” the man confirmed. “Its power source was shot, but we could get you another, if you want to try and get it up and running again.”

Cooper nodded.

“Please,” he said.

That evening, Cooper went back to the hangar and watched the Rangers coming in from patrol, admiring their sleek lines, envying the pilots as they left their cockpits so the crews could wheel the craft into their resting places.

He wasn’t altogether sure what brought him there. Only a few days ago—his time—he had been doing his level best to return to Earth and never see space—or a spaceship—ever again. Now—well, now he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. That plan A had happened—that he had been able to help, and that Murph had managed to go from data to… this, was more than gratifying. It was more than he could ask. But there was a downside to being a hundred and twenty-four.

He would never see Tom again. His son had passed almost two decades ago, and his son Coop—Cooper’s grandson—was biologically old enough to be his father. Almost everyone he knew was dead—except Murph.

As for Murph—he didn’t know how that was going to go. For him, less than a year had passed since they sat together on her bed. For her, however, it had been a lifetime. He had been gone for most of her life. How did he apologize for that?

Sighing, he made his way back to the transplanted farmhouse, but he didn’t hurry. Instead he took in the strange sights of Cooper Station.

Like the Endurance, the huge cylinder spun on its axis. The opening through which his ship had lifted off, so long ago, was essentially the station’s North Pole. It was also the sun. The mirrors he remembered from the days when this place was a launch chamber—the ones that reflected sunlight down its vast shaft—had been replaced by really enormous mirrors, large enough to focus the light of Saturn’s faint sun, yielding enough to illuminate the interior of Cooper Station. Computers kept them tracked and focused, and at dusk folded them up to simulate Earth’s sleep cycle, or at least something like it.

Edmunds’ world didn’t have the same length day-and-night cycles as Earth, and since the eventual goal was to live there, Cooper Station—and her sister stations—were gradually modifying the length of each day. The human circadian rhythm had been the same for millions of years, and asking a body to change too quickly was generally considered to be a bad idea.

He wondered how Brand was doing with that. How she was doing, period. Had she made it? The time dilation had been the same for them. As he popped out into space near Saturn, she was still on course to Edmunds’ world. She was either there, or would be soon. But when he considered everything she would have to accomplish, and all on her own, just to reach Edmunds’ World—the course corrections, placing the Endurance into a stable orbit. Loading the population bomb onto the lander—along with anything else she would ever need, since there wasn’t enough fuel to go back up once the lander had descended.

Taking the lander down would present its own set of problems. What if the atmosphere was unstable? The other planets had thrown them some freakin’ hard curve balls. Even if the little red dot was habitable, who was to say it didn’t have its own surprises?

And then, after all of that, she would have to build a camp, a home for the children to come.

Of course, she wasn’t entirely alone. She had CASE, and there was the long shot that Edmunds was still alive.

He tried to imagine the reunion, but found he didn’t want to think about it. No doubt “Wolf” was a good guy, and he hoped for Brand’s sake that he was still alive.

He really did.

But he didn’t want to think about it too much.

Maybe they had already sent somebody to help her. Any of the Rangers was capable of making the trip, what with the wormhole still sitting right where it had been. He resolved to bring it up next time he saw the administrator. Wolf or no Wolf, Brand would need help.

When he returned to the farmhouse, he found that a new power supply had been brought, as promised, and so he began the work of bringing TARS back to life.

“Settings,” TARS said. “General settings, security setting—”

“Honesty,” Cooper said. “New level setting. Ninety-five percent.”

“Confirmed,” TARS replied. “Additional customization?”

“Yes,” Cooper said. “Humor seventy-five percent. Wait… sixty percent.”

“This place,” TARS said. “Is this what your life on Earth was like?”

“Well, it was never this clean,” Cooper said, glancing around the immaculate house—then beyond, through the windows at the houses and trees—which, their spatial orientation aside—represented a simulacrum of Earth.

“I’m not sure I like this pretending we’re back where we came from,” he murmured.

A nurse was waiting for Cooper as he nervously entered the hospital waiting room. He wasn’t sure what to expect, wasn’t even sure what he felt.

“Is she…?” He left it hanging, in a way not sure what the question really was.

“The family is all in there,” the nurse told him.

“The family?” he asked.

“They all came to see her,” she replied. “She’s been in cryosleep for almost two years.”

She indicated the door and, taking a deep breath, Cooper eased it open. No dresser this time. No chair.

She was there, on the bed, surrounded by people he didn’t know, but many of them had little bits and pieces of Murph in their faces. Children, grandchildren, babies…

And Murph.

The family parted for him as he approached. Some of them were smiling, others looked curious, even puzzled. One little boy hid behind his mother’s knee.

She looked very old, and very frail, but in her eyes he could see his daughter, the little girl with the flaming hair, the beautiful woman berating him over the comm. Murph, in all of her seasons.

Tears were in those eyes, but her face was joyful. She reached for him.

“Murph,” he said, his throat constricting.

“Dad,” she whispered. She nodded to the others, and they quietly backed away.

“You told them I like farming,” he said, shooting her a look.

She smiled that same mischievous smile she’d had when he caught her hiding in the truck. For a moment he just reveled in it.

“Murph,” he said after a time. “It was me. I was your ghost.”

“I know,” she said, lifting her wrist, showing him the watch.

“People didn’t believe me,” she continued. “They thought I’d done it all myself.” She tapped the timepiece. “But I knew who it was…”

He regarded her—amazed, proud, happy, broken-hearted, all at the same time.

“A father looks in his child’s eyes,” Cooper said, “and thinks—maybe it’s them—maybe my child will save the world.”

Murph smiled.

“And everyone,” she continued, “once a child, wants to look into their dad’s eyes and know he saw. But usually, by then, the father is gone.” She gripped his hand a little tighter. “Nobody believed me, but I knew you’d come back.”

“How?” Cooper asked.

“Because my dad promised me,” she replied.

Cooper felt tears rolling down his face.

“I’m here now,” he said, seeing again how feeble, how tiny she looked. “I’m here for you Murph.”

But Murph shook her head.

“No parent should ever have to watch their child die,” she said. “My kids are here for me now. Go.”

“Where?” he asked. Where in this world did he even belong? In that farmhouse?

“It’s so obvious,” Murph sighed.

And she told him.

When she finished talking, a few moments later, the family came back to her, attracted to her as if by gravity. He saw the love they had for her, and she for them. And even though they were also his family, it was as if he was watching from another dimension—as if he was once again Murph’s ghost.

He left, but her words stayed with him.

“It’s so obvious,” she’d said. “Brand. She’s out there.”