Interstellar, page 10
“Can get you killed, same as recklessness,” Cooper opined.
“Cooper!” Doyle chimed in. “Too damned fast!”
“I got this,” Cooper said, as the ship threatened to shake apart around them. His knuckles on the controls were white as he tried to keep them from vibrating out of his hands.
“Should I disable feedback?” Case asked.
“No!” Cooper exploded. “No, I need to feel the air…”
The lander was white-hot now, cutting through a layer of clouds as thin as razors.
“Do we have a fix on the beacon?” he asked.
“Got it!” Case said. “Can you maneuver?”
Yeah, he thought. We have our choice of crash sites, as long as most of them are more-or-less straight down.
“Gotta shave more speed,” he said instead. “I’ll try and spiral down to it.”
A moment later they burst through the clouds. The surface looked far too close to Cooper, but at least they seemed to be over a level surface…
“Just water,” Doyle said.
Cooper realized he was right. They were over an ocean.
“The stuff of life…” Brand said.
“Twelve hundred meters out,” Case advised.
Cooper banked as hard as he could, trying to shed more speed. The surface was coming fast.
“It’s shallow,” Brand said. “Feet deep…”
Now they were low enough they were kicking up a splash, like an overgrown speedboat.
“Seven hundred meters,” Case intoned.
Cooper watched the water sheeting toward him.
“Wait for it…” he said.
“Five hundred meters.”
Cooper yanked the stick back.
“Fire!” he said.
The retro-rockets kicked in just above the surface, punching back against their velocity. He tried to hold it, but the craft slewed sideways as the landing gear came down. They dropped, hit the water, casting up a spray. The impact nearly jarred Cooper’s teeth loose, but he held on stubbornly. Then when the air cleared, they were down, and everything looked good. Brand had been right—the water was really, really shallow—so much so that the landing gear held the Ranger just above the surface.
“Very graceful,” Brand managed. Cooper noticed she and Doyle were staring at him. Both of them looked a little roughed up.
“No,” he said. “But it was very efficient.”
They still just stared, but he pretty much ignored it, wondering how much time had already passed on Earth.
Days?
Months?
Better not to think about it, he decided.
“What’re you waiting for?” he barked. “Go!”
They snapped out of it then, unfastening their harnesses, checking their helmets. Case detached himself from the floor and went to the hatch. It cracked open, and light and spray blew into the cabin.
It caught Cooper, then, in his gut—they were on another world.
EIGHTEEN
Amelia followed Doyle and Case into the shallow sea. Cooper remained aboard the Ranger.
She experimented with sloshing through it as Case took a moment to orient himself. The water felt thicker, heavier than it should. More viscous. It might have been the bulk of her spacesuit, but she didn’t think so. They had practiced with those underwater, back on Earth, in preparation for the mission.
Here, though, it was different.
“This way,” Case directed. “About two hundred meters.”
Amelia looked in the direction the robot indicated. The water stretched out to the horizon, where it met a mountain range, misty with distance; one long ridge that vanished in each direction. The sight of the alien skyline arrested her for a moment, and she wished they weren’t in such a hurry. She had long dreamt of her first moments on an extra-solar planet, and this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. There should be a little ceremony, a little “That’s one small step.”
Instead they were in this tearing hurry, and it felt completely half-assed. But it was what it was. They weren’t here to set up flags and take pictures.
So she pushed forward.
Spacesuits, she decided after a few feet, were not well designed for wading. They were heavy, clumsy, and didn’t give one much of a feel for the surface on which one was walking. And that wasn’t the only thing making it difficult to make any progress.
“The gravity’s punishing,” Doyle panted.
“Floating around in space too long?” Amelia teased.
“One hundred and thirty percent Earth gravity,” Case informed them.
Right, Amelia thought. That explained a lot. This much more gravity wasn’t ideal, but it was something people couldn adapt to. Water was a good sign, and with any luck, there would be at least some habitable land at the foot of the mountains…
They pushed on, with Case still in the lead and Doyle falling behind.
* * *
After what seemed like an eternity, Case stopped.
“Should be here,” he said, and with that he began moving in a search pattern. Amelia moved to join him.
“The signal’s coming from here,” she said, but as soon as she spoke, it didn’t make any sense. The beacon should be with the ship, yet the ship clearly wasn’t here. Even if Miller had crashed, the water here wasn’t deep enough to hide the wreck.
Where had it gone?
Suddenly Case dropped down and began thrashing under the water. He looked for all the world like a film Amelia had once seen, of a bear fishing in a river. That is, if a bear were rectangular, and had metal instead of fur on its exterior.
* * *
Cooper watched Brand, Doyle, and Case with mounting unease. He could almost feel the clock in his head ticking off the time passing back on Earth. How could humanity hope to live on a world so hopelessly out of synch with the rest of the universe?
His chest began to tighten, and he took deep breaths, trying to settle himself. He stared off at the mountains. Something about them reminded him of home, but he couldn’t quite figure out why. He remembered driving toward the mountains with Murph, watching them grow larger as he followed the directions left by “them” on Murph’s floor.
But that wasn’t it. The mountains that hid the old NORAD facility were relatively young peaks; jagged, snowcapped. These formed a startlingly uniform ridge, like a long fold in the planet’s crust. And as tall as they seemed, he couldn’t make out a snowline, unless it was at the very top—that thin little film of white.
Then he realized—it wasn’t mountains he was reminded of at all. Instead, he thought of a dust storm in the distance, a black wall churning across the land.
* * *
Doyle finally caught up with them, thoroughly out of breath.
“What is he doing?” Doyle asked, nodding at the mechanical.
Case answered him by pulling something up from the seabed—if that was what it could be called. Silt streaming off of it suggested that it had been at least partially buried.
“Her beacon,” Amelia said, heart sinking. Where was Miller?
Case dutifully began carrying the beacon toward the Ranger.
“Wreckage,” Doyle said, echoing her own thoughts. “Where’s the rest?”
But she was ahead of him—she had already spotted some flotsam.
“Toward the mountains!” she said, and she starting slogging that way as quickly as she could.
Cooper’s voice crackled over the radio.
“Those aren’t mountains,” he said. His voice sounded strange. She paused and looked at the range again. Did they seem a little more distant?
It had to be some sort of optical illusion.
“They’re waves…” Cooper’s disembodied voice told her.
That went through her like an electrical shock. Not waves, but a wave… one unbelievably huge wave. She could see the tiny white line of foam at the top of it. How high was it? A mile? More? Perspective made it impossible to tell.
It was moving away from them, thank God.
She had to get the recorder. It had to be here. She plowed through the water toward the wreckage.
* * *
Cooper heard some bumping below as Case loaded the beacon. He watched the monster wave recede and then, a peculiar feeling in his gut, he turned to look in the direction it had come from.
And saw the next one looming over them, blotting out the sky.
“Brand, get back here!” he shouted frantically into the comm.
“We need the recorder,” she protested.
Before he could say anything, Doyle’s voice sputtered over the radio.
“Case,” Doyle shouted. “Go get her!”
Cooper slammed his fist into the dash.
What the hell is Brand doing?
“Dammit!” he yelled. “Brand, get back here!”
But she was still out there, looking through the junk in the water.
“We can’t leave without her data,” Brand insisted.
“You don’t have time!” he replied.
He saw Case pass Doyle, who was headed back toward the Ranger, struggling against water and gravity.
“Go, go!” Doyle yelled at the robot.
Case blew past him, churning a wake as he made a beeline toward Brand, reconfigured in wheel-like form.
Cooper ran to the hatch and swung it open. In the distance, he saw Brand trying to lift something out of the water. He looked back at the approaching wave, knowing that it must be thousands of feet high, trying to judge how close it was, how fast it was moving, but the scale made it difficult for his mind to comprehend.
“Get back here, now!” he hollered.
Brand pulled something up. He couldn’t see what it was, but after a moment of struggle she slipped and fell backward. Whatever it was came down on top of her.
She didn’t get back up, although he could see her arms moving. Her face turned toward him, and even at that distance he saw it turn up, focused on the mountain of water hurtling toward them.
“Cooper, go!” she yelled. “Go! I can’t make it.”
“Get up, Brand!” he commanded.
“Go! Get out of here!”
But then Case was there. He flipped the junk away from her, heaved her onto his back, and raced back toward the Ranger.
That’s when Cooper noticed Doyle, just standing there, transfixed by the impossible wave.
“Doyle!” he shouted. “Come on! Case has her!”
The man shook it off and started running back as best he could, struggling with every step.
Cooper jumped back up into the cockpit and started powering up. All he could see now was the wave.
“Come on, come on…” he muttered. Time was almost up.
Desperate, he ran back to the hatch. Doyle had made it to the foot of the ladder, and Case was arriving with Brand. Puffing, Doyle stepped aside to make way for the robot and its passenger.
“Go!” Doyle said.
Case obediently pushed past him, jerking himself up the ladder and unceremoniously dumping Brand inside the ship. Then he turned to help Doyle, who was struggling to ascend the ladder himself.
Before he could get there, the Ranger suddenly jumped up as the leading edge of the surge heaved them out of the shallow trough and up the side of the wave. The Ranger tilted sharply and seawater slapped Doyle back, out of Case’s grip, as it came raging across the hatch. The ship was lifted and everything went sideways.
That fast—the blink of an eye—Doyle was gone.
For that second, Cooper was without emotion. He saw Doyle swept away and knew with crystalline certainty that there was absolutely nothing he could do. Nothing but try to save himself and the others.
“Shut the hatch!” he told Case.
Case obeyed as Cooper stumbled across the tilting deck back to the controls.
“Power down! Power down!” he said. “We have to ride it out.” Emotion returned in a rush. He felt like a coward for abandoning Doyle, although he still understood it would have meant the end of all of them to keep the hatch open. But mostly he felt simple, unadorned fury.
And he turned it on Brand.
“We were not prepared for this!” he shouted.
They were already hundreds of feet in the air, sucked sideways up the mountain of water, and Cooper found himself tossed like a doll across the cockpit as the Ranger began to roll. He managed to grab Brand and jam her into her seat, and after that it was all he could do not to vomit or lose consciousness as everything turned around him.
It was like the Straights all over again; all control gone, at the mercy of the universe…
NINETEEN
After an eternity, the craft stopped rolling and settled upright. Cooper scrambled into his seat as water poured away from the canopy, and he could see their surroundings.
They were at the top of the wave. A glance at his instruments told him they were an absurd four freaking thousand feet above the surface. For a moment, the Ranger surfed along the foaming back of the leviathan, and the view was unreal. The papery clouds above, the sea stretching out in all directions, impossibly far below them, the distant back of the last wave on the horizon, a faint line of white in the other direction.
Cooper stared past the powered-down controls at the incredible fall they were about to take.
Then they took it. Once again he felt free-fall, but this time he knew there would be a stop at the end of it.
* * *
It was all a jumble of pain, terror, and near-absolute disorientation, and it seemed to last forever.
* * *
When the craft finally came to rest, Cooper groggily lurched to the control panel, his hands flying over the controls, powering up. Miraculously, everything came on, so he wasted no time in starting the engines.
They coughed. They sputtered. But they wouldn’t start.
Of course.
He felt the landing gear lift them out the water, and tried the engines again.
Still nothing.
“Too waterlogged,” Case said. “Let it drain.”
“Goddamn!” Cooper shouted, hammering the console.
“I told you to leave me,” Brand said.
“And I told you to get your ass back here,” he retorted. “Difference is, only one of us was thinking about the mission.”
“Cooper, you were thinking about getting home,” she countered. “I was trying to do the right thing!”
“Tell that to Doyle,” he shot back.
The hurt registered in her eyes, and he was glad. He looked at the clock.
“How long to drain, Case?” he asked.
“Forty-five to an hour,” the robot informed him.
Cooper shook his head and uncoupled his helmet. The cabin was pressurized. Everything smelled wet, but it didn’t smell like seawater or a pond. It smelled like distilled water that had been dumped on hot rocks—a mineral scent, but not salt.
“The stuff of life, huh?” he said. “What’s this gonna cost us, Brand?”
“A lot,” she said. “Decades.” Her voice was flat.
Cooper felt like he couldn’t breathe. Decades. Tom and Murph were adults already. How old? It seemed impossible. He rubbed his face, trying to comprehend it. He watched the wave go, knowing there would be another, and soon.
He tried to return his focus to the mission.
“What happened to Miller?” he asked.
“Judging by the wreckage,” Brand said, “she was broken up by a wave soon after impact.”
“How could the wreckage still be here after all these years?” he wondered aloud.
“Because of the time slippage,” Brand said. “On this planet’s time, she landed here just hours ago. She might have only died minutes ago.”
Case indicated the beacon, back by the airlock.
“The data Doyle received was just the initial status, echoing endlessly,” the machine said.
Cooper felt his throat closing.
“We’re not prepared for this, Brand,” he said. “You’re a bunch of eggheads without the survival skills of a Boy Scout troop.”
“We got this far on our brains,” she said defensively. “Further than any humans in history.”
“Not far enough,” he said. “And we’re stuck here till there won’t be anyone left on Earth to save.”
“I’m counting every second, same as you, Cooper,” she said.
He digested that silently for a while. He wasn’t the only one who had left someone behind. Was her father even still alive? How old had he been when they left? And then there was Edmunds, maybe waiting out there, waiting for her to come rescue him.
“Do you have some way we can jump into a black hole and get back the years?” he finally asked.
She dismissed that with a wag of her head.
“Don’t just shake your head at me!” he snapped.
“Time is relative,” Brand said. “It can stretch and squeeze—but it can’t run backward. The only thing that can move across the dimensions like time is gravity.”
He knew that. He’d read it. But he wasn’t ready to give up. Brand didn’t know everything—that much was abundantly clear.
“The beings that led us here,” he said. “They communicate through gravity. Could they be talking to us from the future?”
She was silent for a moment.
“Maybe,” she said at last.
“Well if they can—”
Brand cut him off.
“Look, Cooper,” she said, “they’re creatures of at least five dimensions. To them the past might be a canyon they can climb into, and the future a mountain they can climb up. But to us it’s not. Okay?”
She took off her helmet and regarded him frankly.
“I’m sorry, Cooper,” she said. “I screwed up. But you knew about relativity.”
“My daughter was ten,” he said bitterly. “I couldn’t explain Einstein’s theories before I left.”
“Couldn’t you tell her you were going to save the world?” Brand asked.
“No,” he said. “As a parent, I understood the most important thing—let your kids feel safe. Which rules out telling a ten-year-old that the world’s ending.”
“Cooper?” Case said urgently.
He looked, although he already knew what it had to be. And it was—another wave.
