Interstellar, page 13
Be careful what you wish for, he mused.
They approached the beacon. The signal was coming from high on a frozen cloud mountain. Cooper gave the radar profile a quick once-over, and was convinced that he didn’t want to park right next to it. The icy platform it presented was too small and unstable. Instead, he settled for a larger, flatter, denser stretch a little below it.
* * *
Once down, they began fastening their helmets, but without the blind rush that had driven them on Miller’s world. They were well beyond Gargantua’s time-bending zone, so there was no point in charging headlong into things. He took a good long scan around them to make sure something nasty wasn’t coming up from beneath, dropping down from above, or sneaking in from the sides.
Still, there wasn’t a lot of time to waste, so once he felt pretty secure about the stability of their perch, Tars opened the hatch. Stepping carefully out of the airlock and onto the ice, the four of them began hiking up-slope toward the beacon, Tars bringing up the rear. Cooper hoped desperately that they weren’t in for another game of hide and seek.
But when he crested the ridge he saw it instantly—an orange smudge nestled in the drifts of ice-shatter. He picked up his pace, and soon was gazing at the iced-over form of a Lazarus pod. Tars moved up behind him and began to dig it out, while Cooper prepared for the worst. Mann could easily be as dead as Miller, except this time there would be a body to view. He glanced at Brand and Romilly, and saw the same dread hanging on their expressions.
Once the craft’s airlock was clear and open, Cooper stepped in cautiously. The cabin was empty of life, eerie in the faint blue light filtering through the icy windows. Then Tars powered the module up and the lights came on. Cooper saw the cryo-chamber and moved toward it, as Tars clanked along behind him. With his gloved hand he brushed ice from the nameplate.
Dr. Mann, it read.
After a quick status check, Tars activated the cryo-chamber, and the ice began to melt. While he did that, Cooper shut the airlock again. Once it was sealed and the air cycled, he doffed his helmet. The air was stale, but breathable, and tinged with the slight acrid scent of ammonia. There was a mechanical robot, like Tars and Case, lying off to one side, dismantled.
After a short time the cryo-bed signaled all was ready, and Cooper cracked the lid open, revealing the plastic-shrouded figure inside. He was still ready for the worst. The water around the body was now a bit warm, and vapor drifted up into the chilly air.
Cooper found the seal in the plastic, and ripped it open.
A man about his own age lay there. His squared-off face was strong even in sleep, but as Cooper watched, his eyes flickered open, blue, at first without focus, looking at nothing. Then—confused and maybe frightened—he reached for Cooper with trembling hands and grabbed him, embraced him cheek to cheek.
Mann began sobbing, caressing Cooper’s face as if it was the face of his mother. Cooper didn’t mind, and was in fact overwhelmed by a deep compassion for the man. Unable to even imagine what he was feeling, he just held him tightly, the way he had held his kids when they woke from a nightmare.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”
* * *
“Pray you never learn just how good it can be, just to see another face.”
Mann spoke in a husky voice. His hands shook his mug of tea as he took a sip from it. He looked from face to face, as if each was the most amazing thing he had ever seen.
“I hadn’t much hope to begin with,” he went on. “After so much time, I had none. My supplies were exhausted. The last time I went to sleep, I set no waking date. You have literally raised me from the dead.”
Cooper shot him a smile.
“Lazarus,” he said.
Mann nodded, then flicked his eyes up.
“And the others?” he asked.
“I’m afraid you’re it, sir,” Romilly said.
Mann looked a little stunned.
“So far, surely?” Mann said hopefully.
“With our situation,” Cooper told him, “there’s not much hope of any other rescue.”
It was almost as if Cooper had punched him. Mann looked down at his tea, dazed by grief. They let him have his moment of silence.
“Dr. Mann,” Brand said, after a bit, “tell us about your world.”
“My world,” he said softly. “Yes. Our world, we hope. Our world is cold, stark, but undeniably beautiful…”
* * *
“The days are sixty-seven cold hours,” Mann told them. “The nights are sixty-seven far colder hours…”
He turned and led them back toward the shelter of his landing craft.
“The gravity is a very pleasant eighty percent of Earth’s,” he said. “Up here, where I landed, the ‘water’ is alkali and the ‘air’ has too much ammonia in it to breathe for more than a few minutes. But down on the surface—and there is a surface—the ammonia gives way to crystalline hydrocarbons and breathable air. To organics. Possibly even to life. Yes, we may be sharing this world.”
Brand began checking Mann’s data, and the more she read, the more she seemed positively giddy. Finally she looked up from the screen.
“These readings are from the surface?” she asked, as if it didn’t seem real.
“Over the years I’ve dropped various probes,” Mann confirmed.
“How far have you explored?” Cooper asked.
“I’ve mounted several major expeditions,” Mann said. “But with oxygen in limited supply, Kipp there had to do most of the legwork.” He indicated the machine that could have been a brother to Tars or Case, except that it was lying about in various pieces.
“What’s wrong with him?” Tars asked.
“Degeneration,” Mann replied. “He misidentified the first organics we found as ammonia crystals. We struggled on for a time, but ultimately I decommissioned him and used his power source to keep the mission going.” He shook his head sadly. “I thought I was alone before I shut him down.”
“Would you like me to look at him?” Tars asked.
“No,” Mann said. “He needs a human touch.”
Tars didn’t reply. Instead he turned abruptly to Brand.
“Dr. Brand,” he said, “Case is relaying a message for you from the comm station.”
She nodded, and Tars began the playback on his data screen.
Cooper’s stomach clenched as the face of a woman appeared. It took a moment for him to recognize it as the face of his daughter.
Murph!
But she wasn’t calling him, she was calling Brand, and worse, Murph was delivering the news that Brand’s father was dead. He couldn’t tell which of the two women seemed more upset at the news, but it looked as if it was Murph.
“He had no pain and was… at peace,” she was saying. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Is that Murph?” Brand asked in an abstract voice.
Cooper nodded and tried to think of something to say as he watched Murph reach to turn the camera off.
“She’s become a—” Brand began, but she didn’t finish, because Murph didn’t turn off the camera. She pulled her hand back, and a strange look came over her. Anger, instant and intense.
“Did you know, Brand?” Murph demanded furiously. “Did he tell you? That plan A was a sham? You knew, didn’t you? You left us here. To die.
“Never coming back…”
Stunned, Cooper stared at Brand’s face, watched the shock run across it. He wanted to ask what the hell she was talking about, but couldn’t find the words.
“You left us here to set up your colony,” Murph went on, tears starting down her cheeks. He stared aghast as she struggled with her next words, and he knew. He knew what she was going to ask.
As quickly as it had appeared, the anger was gone, and her voice became very small.
“Did my father know?” she asked. “Dad…?”
And somehow, over impossible distance and through strange, twisted time, she was looking straight into his eyes.
“Did you leave me here to die?”
Then the screen did go dark, and he felt the whole of himself ache and he knew it was true, that he should have known. Should always have known.
Suddenly he realized that Brand was staring at him.
“Cooper,” she said, “my father devoted his whole life to plan A. I have no idea what she means—”
“I do,” Mann said quietly. Cooper turned to find him looking at them with an expression of gentle compassion. But before he could continue, Cooper found his voice.
“He never even hoped to get people off Earth,” he said. He felt husked out, like a stalk of corn rotted by the blight. Empty for the moment, although he was certain the pain would come.
“No,” Mann confirmed.
“But he’s been trying to solve the gravity equation for forty years!” Brand protested.
Mann stepped closer and regarded her empathetically.
“Amelia,” he said, “your father solved his equation before I even left.”
“Then why wouldn’t he use it?” she asked, in a tortured voice.
“The equation couldn’t reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics,” he told her. “You need more.”
“More what?” Cooper demanded.
“More data,” he replied. “You need to see inside a black hole. And the laws of nature prohibit a naked singularity.”
“Is that true?” Cooper asked Romilly. The astrophysicist nodded.
“If a black hole is an oyster,” Romilly explained, “the singularity is the pearl inside. Its gravity is so strong, it’s always hidden in darkness, behind the horizon. That’s why we call it a black hole.”
“If we could look beyond the horizon—” Cooper said.
“Some things aren’t meant to be known,” Mann told him.
That’s it? Cooper wondered. That’s all you’ve got? It seemed to him an absurd thing for a scientist to say. Like the fox in the fable, unable to reach the grapes, declaring they must be sour anyhow. But how many times in history had that declaration been made, and how often had those who said it been proven wrong?
The black hole was right there.
There had to be a way.
Mann turned to speak to Brand again.
“Your father had to find another way to save the human race from extinction,” he said. “Plan B. A colony.”
Yet Brand still wasn’t willing to give up the point. That made Cooper feel better, because he didn’t think she was acting. She hadn’t been in on it. Hadn’t been lying to him all of this time.
“But why not tell people?” Brand demanded. “Why keep building the damn station?”
“How much harder would it be for people to come together and save the species instead of themselves?” Mann gave Cooper a sympathetic glance. “Or their children?”
“Bullshit,” Cooper said flatly.
“Would you have left, if you hadn’t believed you were trying to save them?” Mann challenged. “Evolution has yet to transcend that simple barrier—we can care deeply, selflessly for people we know, but our empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight.”
“But the lie,” Brand said, her voice low and disbelieving. “The monstrous lie…”
“Unforgivable,” Mann agreed. “And he knew it. Your father was prepared to destroy his own humanity to save our species. He made the ultimate sacrifice.”
“No,” Cooper said, feeling the boil, the fury at so ludicrous a claim: that the sacrifice of one man’s reputation rose anywhere near the level of “ultimate.”
“No,” he said grimly. “That’s being made by the people of Earth, who’ll die because in his arrogance, he declared their case hopeless.”
Mann gave him a look, and under other circumstances his expression might have seemed earnest. Now it only seemed condescending.
“I’m sorry, Cooper,” he said. “Their case is hopeless. We are the future.”
Then the bottom dropped out of everything. Cooper realized that he should have known better. He had just been so damned eager to get back into space, he’d been prepared to believe any goddamn thing Professor Brand said.
“I’m asking you to trust me,” he’d said. “When you return, I’ll have solved the problem of gravity. You have my word.”
Brand put a hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t move.
“Cooper,” she said. “What can I do?”
He took a moment.
“Let me go home,” he said.
PART THREE
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…
