Interstellar, page 19
“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.
