Interstellar, page 14
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…
