Interstellar, page 5
“Hello, Cooper,” the man said.
For a moment he couldn’t say anything.
“Professor Brand?” he finally managed.
“Just take a seat, Mr. Cooper,” one of the men at the table—youngish, with black hair and a beard—said. Professor Brand remained silent.
Head reeling, Cooper did as he was asked, drawing up a seat. Murph sat beside him. There were five other people sitting at the table. One—an older fellow with glasses and an air of authority—leaned toward them.
“Explain how you found this facility,” he demanded.
“Stumbled across it,” Cooper lied. “Looking for salvage and I saw the fence—”
The man held up a hand and stopped him. The tight wrinkles that formed his face clinched into disapproving lines.
“You’re sitting in the world’s best-kept secret,” he said. “You don’t stumble in. And you certainly don’t stumble out.”
“Cooper, please,” Professor Brand said, his voice as even and soothing as it had been decades before. “Cooperate with these people.”
The professor was a good guy, at least as Cooper remembered him. Not the sort of man who would end up in anything unsavory. But there were a great many things he once thought of as true.
Still, when he looked at Professor Brand, he wanted to trust him.
Maybe the truth is our best bet, Cooper thought. But as he examined the unfriendly faces surrounding him, he realized how crazy the truth was going to sound.
“It’s hard to explain,” he began, “but we learned these coordinates from an anomaly…”
“What sort of anomaly?” another man demanded. It was the black-haired fellow who had first told Cooper to sit down. There was an intensity about the question, and as soon as it was asked, everyone else at the table seemed to become a little more alert.
“I don’t want to term it ‘supernatural,’” Cooper said, “but…”
A couple of them looked away in what appeared to be frustration. Whatever it was they wanted to hear, he wasn’t saying it. Then the man with the glasses leaned forward again, his face and tone deadly serious.
“You’re going to have to be specific, Mr. Cooper,” he said. “Real quick.”
Okay, here goes…
“After the last dust storm,” Cooper said. “It was a pattern… in dust…”
“It was gravity,” Murph stated flatly.
And suddenly everyone was gawking at his daughter, as excited as kids on Christmas morning. The black-haired man—the young, bearded one without glasses—looked at Professor Brand, then turned to Cooper.
“Where was this gravitational anomaly?” he asked.
Again, Cooper ran his gaze around the room.
“Look,” he said, cautiously, “I’m happy you’re excited about gravity, but if you want more answers from us I’m gonna need assurances.”
“Assurances?” the bespectacled man said.
Cooper covered Murph’s ears with his palms. She gave him a look, but he ignored it.
“That we’re getting out of here,” he whispered fiercely. “And not in the trunk of some car.”
Suddenly the younger Dr. Brand began… laughing. Whatever reaction Cooper was expecting, that wasn’t it. Even the man with the glasses smiled.
“Don’t you know who we are, Coop?” Professor Brand looked at him, apparently bemused. Cooper began to think everyone but him knew the joke.
“No,” Cooper said, feeling like he was going out of his mind. “No, I don’t.”
Brand—the pretty one—pointed around the table.
“Williams,” she said, naming the man with the glasses. Then she continued, “Doyle, Jenkins, Smith. You already know my father, Professor Brand.
“We’re NASA.”
“NASA?”
“NASA,” Professor Brand affirmed. “Same NASA you flew for.”
Everyone chuckled, and suddenly Cooper was laughing, too. Relief washed through him like a clear spring of water. Then he glanced at Murph, who looked confused, not getting the gist of it at all.
But then one of the walls began to open, and through the gap, Cooper saw something he had never imagined he would see again. The flared exhaust nozzles of a booster rocket.
* * *
“I heard you got shut down for refusing to drop bombs from the stratosphere onto starving people,” Cooper said to Professor Brand as they entered the chamber with the spacecraft and passed on through to another part of the complex.
The professor shook his head.
“When they realized killing other people wasn’t the long-term solution, they needed us back,” he said. “Set us up in the old NORAD facility. In secret.”
Well, I was right about the NORAD part, at least.
“Why secret?” Cooper asked.
“Public opinion won’t allow spending on space exploration,” the professor said. “Not when we’re struggling to put food on the table.”
That’s why so much effort has been put into convincing folks that the space program was a myth, a scam, Cooper realized with sudden clarity. He remembered again the conversation with Murph’s teacher, Miss Hanley. What was it she had said? “Our children need to learn about this planet. Not tales of leaving it.”
As if the Earth existed without the sun, the planets, the stars, the rest of the universe. As if staring harder at the dirt would give them all the answers they needed.
They approached a large door. Professor Brand opened it, and waved him through.
Like everything he had encountered in the last twenty-four hours, what greeted Cooper wasn’t what he was expecting. It took him a moment, in fact, to grasp what he was seeing. His first impression was of being outside, but it took only heartbeats for that notion to fade. Instead, he found himself looking at the largest greenhouse complex he had ever seen. Fields the size of plantations, all under glass.
“Blight,” the professor said. “Wheat seven years ago, okra this year. Now there’s just corn.”
Something about that stung a little. He was, after all, a farmer.
“But we’re growing more now than ever,” he protested.
“Like the potatoes in Ireland, like the wheat in the dust bowl, the corn will die,” Professor Brand said. “Soon.”
Behind them, the young Dr. Brand entered with Murph, who looked around in undisguised awe. Cooper had seen places like this, albeit long ago. Murph had never seen anything of the kind.
She also looked bleary-eyed.
“Murph is a little tired,” the younger Brand said. “I’m taking her to my office for a nap.”
Cooper nodded, a little relieved. This was probably a conversation his daughter did not need to hear.
“We’ll find a way,” Cooper objected, once she was out of earshot. “We always have.”
“Driven by the unshakable faith that the Earth is ours,” Professor Brand added, a bit sarcastically.
“Not just ours,” Cooper said. “But it is our home.”
The professor regarded him coolly.
“Earth’s atmosphere is 80 percent nitrogen,” he pointed out. “We don’t even breathe nitrogen.” He pointed to a stalk of corn. The leaves were blotched and striped with grey, which along with the ashen, tumescent blobs of infected kernels were the telltale signs of infection.
“Blight does,” the professor continued. “And as it thrives, our air contains less and less oxygen.” He gestured toward Murph. “The last people to starve will be the first to suffocate. Your daughter’s generation will be the last to survive on Earth.”
Cooper stared at him. He wanted to continue to protest, to advocate for hope. New strains of corn could be bred. The answer to the blight might come the day after tomorrow. Human beings were resourceful—it was their hallmark as a race.
But in the pith of him, he knew that everything Professor Brand was saying was true. Unbidden, he experienced an image of Murph, gasping for breath, her eyes, mouth and nostrils caked with dust…
He turned to the professor.
“Tell me this is where you explain how you’re going to save the world,” he said.
* * *
Their next stop was another room, this one on a scale that dwarfed even the last. But this time he knew instantly what he was seeing, and it brought long-buried feelings rushing back, hard.
It was a multi-stage rocket—a big one—contained in a vastly larger cylindrical chamber. In fact, the launch chamber seemed far larger than necessary, by several orders of magnitude. He felt like an ant in a grain silo. High, high above, light shone, this time unmistakably that of the sun, reflected in by a ring of mirrors.
From the look of things, it appeared to be dawn outside.
“We’re not meant to save the world,” Professor Brand said. “We’re meant to leave it.”
Cooper couldn’t take his eyes off of the rocket. He let his gaze travel up, taking in every beautiful inch of her, not in a hurry. When he reached the top he saw two sleek craft mounted there, belly-to-belly, and he knew them.
“Rangers,” he murmured. Lineal descendants of the rocket planes like the X-15, and the space shuttles that followed, the winged Rangers could maneuver easily in an atmosphere. Unlike their predecessors, however, they were equally suited for deep space—at least in theory. None of them had ever made it there before the program was cut.
Or so he had believed. So he had been told when he was forced to retire, sent to “do his duty” in the fields, almost two decades ago.
“The last components of our one versatile ship in orbit, the Endurance,” Professor Brand said. “Our final expedition.”
Final, Cooper thought, in a daze. That suggested others. And there had been a fair number of craft in his day. He’d assumed they’d been broken up and recast as farm equipment. But now…
“What happened to the other vehicles?” Cooper asked.
A new, unreadable expression played across the old man’s face.
“The Lazarus missions,” he said.
“Sounds cheerful,” Cooper replied.
“Lazarus came back from the dead—” Dr. Brand began.
“He had to die in the first place,” Cooper interjected. “You sent people out there looking for a new home…?” He trailed off, incredulous, but Professor Brand just nodded as if it all made perfect sense.
“There’s no planet in our solar system that can support life,” Cooper said. “And it’d take them a thousand years to reach the nearest star. That doesn’t even qualify as futile…” He shook his head. “Where did you send them, Professor?”
“Cooper,” Professor Brand said, “I can’t tell you any more unless you agree to pilot this craft.”
Cooper stared at him, dumbfounded.
“You’re the best we ever had,” the older man added.
What was he talking about? It had been decades. Everything Cooper had experienced, through most of his adult life, told him this whole thing was impossible. And yet…
To be asked to participate sent an undeniable thrill through him.
Which in turn made him more cautious than ever.
“I barely left the stratosphere,” Cooper objected.
“This crew’s never left the simulator,” the professor said. “We can’t program this mission from Earth, and we don’t know what’s out there. We need a pilot. And this is the mission you were trained for.”
Cooper thought back to his training. Sure as hell no one had ever mentioned anything like this to him. He’d thought Mars, maybe, or Europa at the outside.
“Without ever knowing,” he said. “An hour ago, you didn’t even know I was still alive. And you were going anyway.”
“We had no choice,” Professor Brand said. “But something brought you here. They chose you.”
He felt a little chill at that, remembering Murph’s ghost, the lines in the dust, the coordinates that showed him the way to this place and these people. In the back of his mind, he’d thought he would find the mysterious messenger here, but by now it was clear that wasn’t the case.
Yet from the professor’s words, he understood that there was a messenger. It wasn’t all some figment of his imagination.
“Who’s ‘they?’” he asked.
But the professor fell silent. Cooper knew the drill. The man had baited the hook, and he was biding his time until the fish was firmly on the line.
Cooper thought about it, about the impossibility—and the possibility—of what the professor was saying.
“How long would I be gone?” he finally asked.
“Hard to know,” Brand said. “Years.”
“I’ve got my kids, professor,” he said.
The professor nodded, then looked up, solemn and serious.
“Get out there and save them,” he said.
Years, Cooper thought. Years. And yet, the chance to do this. To live in a dream that had almost faded away; to go out there, push at the boundaries of what was known. To do something that could save his kids, save everyone…
But years?
He met the professor’s gaze.
“Who’s ‘they?’” he repeated.
ELEVEN
Back in the conference room, an image of the solar system appeared on the screen, and a fellow who had been introduced to him as Romilly stood next to it.
He was a young man with a smooth, almost polished scalp, a close-cropped beard, black hair and striking dark features. He couldn’t be older than thirty-five. He seemed shy, and spoke in an odd, clipped, almost distracted fashion.
“We started detecting gravitational anomalies almost fifty years ago,” Romilly said. “Mostly small distortions in the upper atmosphere—I believe you encountered one yourself.”
At first Cooper assumed Romilly meant the pattern in Murph’s room, but then the “upper atmosphere” part registered, and his eyes widened as it came back to him.
His instruments going crazy.
Controls ripped from his hands…
“Over the Straights,” he blurted. “My crash—something tripped my fly-by wire.”
“Exactly,” Romilly said. “But the most significant anomaly was this…” Saturn suddenly took front and center, with its banded, ochre clouds, expansive rings, and mysterious moons. But when Romilly zoomed in, it wasn’t on the planet or any of its satellites, but on a small group of stars.
As the magnification increased, Cooper could see they were rippling, as if seen through a perturbed pool of water.
“A disturbance in space-time, out near Saturn,” Romilly said.
Cooper studied the disfigured constellations.
“A wormhole?” Cooper asked, doubtfully. It just didn’t seem possible.
“It appeared forty-eight years ago,” Romilly confirmed.
A wormhole, his brain repeated. A wormhole!
There were two essential problems with star travel. The first was that space was big—really big. Things were really far apart. The nearest star to Earth, other than the sun, was so far away that it took light more than four years to make the trip.
A starship traveling at half the speed of light would require more than sixteen years to make the round trip to their nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri. But that was moot, because no ship he was aware of could go even the tiniest significant fraction of the speed of light.
So a trip to Proxima would take tens of thousands of years for any ship humanity had ever built. Other stars—the ones more likely to have life-bearing planets—were much, much further away.
But a wormhole… That was the northwest passage of star travel—or more aptly, the Panama Canal—the shortcut that meant you didn’t have to sail all the way around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope, just to get from Hong Kong to New York.
Except a wormhole was better than that. It was a tunnel that just cut through all of that bothersome distance separating one place from another. And you did it in a fraction of the travel time. Relativity predicted wormholes, he remembered, but no one had ever seen one. They remained in the realm of theory.
Or so he’d thought. Yet here he was looking at one.
“Where does it lead?” Cooper asked.
“Another galaxy,” Romilly said.
Another galaxy? Cooper tried to bend that through his mind. Those distorted stars didn’t belong to Earth’s sky, or to the sky of any planet in the Milky Way. That, at least, was what Romilly was claiming. On one level, the very idea seemed preposterous. Yet these people seemed very serious about it indeed.
And there was something else. Something he remembered from his studies, back in the day.
“A wormhole isn’t a naturally occurring phenomenon,” Cooper said.
It was Dr. Brand who responded.
“Someone placed it there,” she agreed, trying to suppress a smile, her dark eyes challenging him to believe her.
“‘They,’” he said.
She nodded. “And whoever ‘they’ are, they appear to be looking out for us,” she said. “That wormhole lets us travel to other stars. It came along right as we needed it.”
“They’ve put potentially habitable worlds within our reach,” Doyle put in, excitement tangible in his voice. “Twelve, in fact, judging from our initial probes.”
“You sent probes into it?” Cooper asked.
“We sent people into it,” Professor Brand said. “Ten years ago.”
“The Lazarus missions,” Cooper guessed.
Professor Brand rose and gestured at the walls of the conference room, where twelve portraits hung. Cooper had noticed them before, but hadn’t studied them in detail.
They all were of astronauts, garbed in white spacesuits, sans masks, with the American flag and NASA logo on their shoulders. He had assumed the portraits dated to decades ago, but now he realized he didn’t recognize any of their faces. These were astronauts he could not name.
“Twelve possible worlds,” the professor said. “Twelve Ranger launches carrying the bravest humans ever to live, led by the remarkable Dr. Mann.”
Doyle picked up from there. In contrast with Romilly, Doyle had a sort of focused intensity.
“Each person’s landing pod had sufficient life support for two years,” he explained, “but they could use hibernation to stretch that, making observations on organics over a decade or more. Their mission was to assess their world, and if it was showing promise, send a signal, bed down for a long nap, and wait to be rescued.”
