Interstellar, page 6
Cooper tried to imagine that. Alone, inconceivably far away from home, gambling everything on finding one habitable world out of twelve.
“And if their world didn’t show promise?” Cooper asked.
“Hence the bravery,” Doyle replied.
“Because you don’t have the resources to visit all twelve,” Cooper said.
“No,” Doyle confirmed. “Data transmission back through the wormhole is rudimentary—simple binary ‘pings’ on an annual basis, to give some clue as to which worlds have potential.” He paused, then added, “One system shows promise.”
“One?” Cooper said. “Kind of a long shot.”
Doyle shook his head, and his blue eyes flashed confidence.
“One system with three potential worlds,” Dr. Brand said. “No long shot.”
Cooper paused a moment to let it sink in. Three worlds, each—or all—offering potential new homes. Hope for his children and grandchildren. But if this ship, this Endurance was the only remaining deep-space vessel…
“So if we find a new home,” he asked, “what then?”
Professor Brand shot him an approving look.
“That’s the long shot,” he said. “There’s plan A, and there’s plan B. Did you notice anything strange about the launch chamber?”
* * *
The first time Cooper had been in the launch chamber, all he had been able to see was the rocket boosters and the Rangers perched upon it. Sure, he had off-handedly noticed that the chamber was a little bigger than it needed to be. But now, as he really studied it, he realized it was huge. Mind-bogglingly so.
It was shaped and proportioned something like a traditional grain silo, but if it was scaled down to the size of a grain silo, the Rangers and their boosters would become little more than largish models. The actual circumference of the upright cylinder looked to be as much as a third of a mile.
Hell, it might be more.
Though that was unusual, it wasn’t really the strangest part—not by far. The walls of the vast cylinder weren’t smooth, the way a normal launch silo would be. Normally, a silo’s main function was to shield the rest of the compound from a launch or—in the worst-case scenario—an explosion. So there would be no protuberances.
High above where he stood, several odd structures had been built onto the interior surface—were still being constructed, in fact. He couldn’t imagine what they were, though, or what their uses might be. Some almost looked like buildings, but jutting out at weird angles that would make them unusable.
Suddenly his perspective shifted, and dizzyingly. What if the structures actually were buildings? Houses, schools, other facilities. At the very thought, their purposes became clear. And yet, they were built along the curve, horizontal to the ground, useless…
On Earth, he thought. They’d be useless here on Earth. With a planetary gravity. But in space, with the vast cylinder spinning along its axis, “down” would be relative. The entire inner surface of the cylinder would become the ground on which folks would walk.
“This whole facility,” he began, still not quite believing what he was saying, “it’s a vehicle? A space station?”
“Both,” Professor Brand said. “We’ve been working on it—and others like it—for twenty-five years. Plan A.”
Cooper ran his gaze around the inside-out world that was still a work in progress. He’d seen designs for things like this, but they were meant to be built in space, not beneath the surface of a planet.
“How does it get off the Earth?” he asked. It seemed undoable. Even if there were thrusters powerful enough to push it into orbit, the entire structure would break up under the acceleration. No object so large could handle the force necessary to escape Earth’s pull.
“Those first gravitational anomalies changed everything,” Professor Brand explained. “Suddenly we knew that harnessing gravity was real. So I started working on the theory—and we started building this station.”
Cooper heard something in the professor’s tone.
“But you haven’t solved it yet,” he guessed, and the older man nodded grimly.
“That’s why there’s a plan B,” Dr. Brand said, her dark eyes studying him. Weighing him up, maybe? Trying to decide if he was worthy?
She motioned, and led Cooper to a nearby lab full of devices built for purposes he couldn’t even guess. They came to a stop in front of a vault made of glass and steel. It housed a series of movable shelves fronted by circular white seals. Dr. Brand grasped a handle on one and turned. The seal opened and she pulled out a cylindrical steel unit housing a multitude of glass vials.
Condensation sighed out from the now empty cavity, like a breath on a cold day.
“The problem is gravity,” she said. “How to get a viable amount of human life off this planet. This is one way. Plan B—a population bomb. Almost five thousand fertilized eggs, preserved in containers weighing in at under nine hundred kilos.”
Five thousand children, he thought. Five thousand, in this little vault, waiting to be brought into the world.
“How could you raise them?” Cooper asked.
“With equipment on board, we incubate the first ten,” Brand replied, as if she was talking about planting corn. “After that, with surrogacy, the growth becomes exponential. Within thirty years, we might have a colony of hundreds. The real difficulty of colonization is genetic diversity.” She pointed to the glass vials enclosed by the device. “This takes care of that.”
Cooper looked at the thing, an uncomfortable feeling growing in the back of his mind. Genetic diversity, sure—five thousand fertilized eggs could be selected to represent the entire range of human variation. Efficient, maybe, but it was clinical, cold. And it presented one huge problem.
“So we just give up on people here?” he asked.
“That’s why plan A’s a lot more fun,” Dr. Brand said.
Cooper thought about the huge Earthbound station. How much had it cost? What a massive gamble—every dime spent here was a dime not being spent trying to beat the blight, to feed the people of the planet. Was the professor really that sure he could pull this out of his hat? He seemed to have convinced all of the right people that he could.
Maybe the professor is right, he mused. He knows a helluva lot more than I do about the big picture. Maybe whoever was studying the blight had decided it couldn’t be fought—that, as Professor Brand said, it was just a matter of time. Maybe they were spending resources on this project because, no matter how far-fetched the whole thing seemed, it was the only hope humanity had.
A lot of really smart people had to have bought into the idea.
Of course, even smart people can be wrong.
Still, it was all better than what he had feared at first. They hadn’t turned back to weapons, thank God, and war. He hadn’t stumbled onto a plan to take what little was left and hoard it away. They weren’t trying to squeeze the last remaining drops of life from the dirt.
No, instead of looking down, they were looking up.
They had turned back to the stars.
* * *
Later, Professor Brand showed him the equations. Cooper had had plenty of math back in the day, but it had been more applied than theoretical, so this was all way beyond him. The equations covered more than a dozen blackboards in the professor’s office, complete with diagrams, and while he could pick out parts of it, the rest might as well have been written in cuneiform, as far as he was concerned.
“Where have you got to?” Cooper asked.
“Almost there,” Professor Brand assured him.
“Almost? You’re asking me to hang everything on ‘almost?’”
The professor stepped a little closer.
“I’m asking you to trust me,” he said. Professor Brand’s eyes were burning with what seemed like a limitless passion, and Cooper realized that the old man had thrown all of himself into this. He believed—really believed—that it could be done. Cooper had seen glimpses of this fervor before, back in the day, but he had never understood what lay behind it.
Now he did. The survival of the human race.
“All those years of training,” he said. “You never told me.”
“We can’t always be open about everything, Coop, even if we want to be.” The professor paused, and then he said, “What can you tell your children about this mission?”
That was a tender point, one he had already been considering. What would he tell Tom and Murph? That the world was ending? That he was going off into space to try and save it? And if he had known all those years ago he was training for such a mission, how would he have reacted?
There was no way to know. So much time had passed, so much had occurred, he barely knew the young man he had once been.
“Find us a new home,” the professor said. “When you return, I’ll have solved the problem of gravity. You have my word.”
TWELVE
The truck had barely rolled to a stop before Murph swung the door open and dashed for the house. On the porch, Donald watched her whiz past, then shot his son-in-law a questioning look.
Cooper simply shook his head and followed Murph inside and up the stairs. He heard a dragging sound coming from her room.
When he tried to open her door, it only cracked a little—from what he could tell, she had stacked a desk and a chair against it.
“Murph?” he attempted.
“Go!” she shouted. “If you’re leaving, just go!”
* * *
Donald listened in his usual way, without many interruptions or much expression, just taking it in as it came. It was a little cool on the porch, but Cooper preferred to be out beneath the night sky, rather than in the house.
After a time, he’d given Donald the full story of what had happened to him and Murph. He sat back to see how the old man would react.
“This world was never enough for you, was it, Coop?” Donald said.
Cooper didn’t answer right away. He knew it was an indictment, that there was an accusation there. Donald took things as they came. He might grouse a little here and there, but he was adaptable. And he was good at finding the virtue in whatever situation presented itself. He was a man who counted his blessings more often than he railed against injustice.
Nothing wrong with that, Cooper mused. The world needed people like Donald, and always had. But it needed more than one kind of person. It needed the men who sailed dangerous seas, to discover unknown lands. Those men had not been—for the most part—of the “count-your-blessings” sort.
“I’m not gonna lie to you, Donald,” Cooper said. “Heading out there is what I feel born to do, and it excites me. That doesn’t make it wrong.”
Donald thought about that for a moment.
“It might,” the old man countered. “Don’t trust the right thing, done for the wrong reason. The ‘why’ of a thing—that’s the foundation.”
“Well, the foundation’s solid,” Cooper said, a bit sadly. He swept his hand out toward the fields, the distant mountains—the world.
“We farmers sit here every year when the rains fail and say ‘next year.’” He paused, and looked at his father-in-law. “Next year ain’t gonna save us. Nor the one after. This world’s a treasure, Donald. But she’s been telling us to leave for a while now. Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.”
He stopped, feeling somehow a little hollow, even though he believed everything he said. He was right, and Donald would get to that.
So would the kids.
Donald brushed some dust off of the porch rail. He pursed his lips, and now he did seem emotional—uncharacteristically so.
“Tom’ll be okay,” he said, as if reading Cooper’s mind. “But you have to make it right with Murph…”
“I will,” Cooper said, even though he knew it was easier said than done.
“Without making any promises you don’t know you can keep,” Donald finished, looking him directly in the eye.
Cooper looked away, nodding.
Feeling the burden.
* * *
Cooper figured he’d let Murph cool down overnight, that she’d be easier to approach after some sleep. But the next morning, the door was still barricaded. He pressed it open gingerly, until he could reach the chair and pull it down from where it was stacked on the desk. Then he pushed it wider and stepped in.
Murph was in her bed, back turned to him.
“You have to talk to me,” he said.
She didn’t respond, and he wondered if she might still be asleep.
“I have to fix this before I go,” he said.
He leaned over her to see her face, and he felt a sort of shock go through him. Her cheeks were still blazing and tear-stained, and he wondered if she’d slept at all.
“Then I’ll keep it broken,” she said stubbornly. “So you have to stay.”
So that’s how it’s gonna be.
Cooper sat on the bed. He had taken Donald’s advice to heart, and had been practicing what to say, staying up half the night. He hadn’t expected Murph to still be this upset, however. In his mind’s-eye rehearsal, he’d been having this conversation with a calmer, quieter daughter.
He still had to give it a go, though, and he thought he knew how to begin.
“After you kids came along,” he told her, “your mother said something I didn’t really understand. She said, ‘I look at the babies and see myself as they’ll remember me.’”
He studied Murph to see if it was sinking in.
At least she appeared to be listening. So he continued.
“She said, ‘It’s as if we don’t exist anymore, like we’re ghosts, like we’re just there to be memories for our kids.’”
He paused again before going on. The expression on Murph’s face was a little puzzled—and he didn’t blame her. It had taken him a while to get it himself.
“Now I realize,” he said, “once we’re parents, we’re just the ghosts of our children’s futures.”
“You said ghosts don’t exist,” Murph replied defiantly.
“That’s right,” Cooper said. “I can’t be your ghost right now—I need to exist. Because they chose me. They chose me, Murph. You saw it.”
Murph sat up and pointed at the shelves, at the gaps between the books.
“I figured out the message,” she said. She opened her notebook. “It was Morse code.”
“Murph…” Cooper said, gently.
She ignored him.
“One word,” she continued. “You know what it is?”
He shook his head. She held out her notebook so he could see it.
STAY
“It says ‘stay,’ Dad.” She peered at him, waiting for his response.
“Oh, Murph,” he said, his voice sad.
“You don’t believe me?” she said, her eyes flashing defiantly. “Look at the books. Look at—”
He reached out and took her in his arms, stopping her from saying anymore. She felt so little, and she was trembling.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “It’s okay.”
She pressed her face into his shoulder, sobbing.
“Murph,” he said, “a father looks in his child’s eyes and thinks, ‘Maybe it’s them. Maybe my child will save the world.’ And everyone, once a child, wants to look into their own dad’s eyes and know he saw they saved some little corner of the world. But usually, by then, the father is gone.”
“Like you will be,” she said, and she sniffed. Cooper gazed at his daughter, at the fear and pain written on her face.
“No,” he said. “I’m coming back.” Even as he said it, he understood he’d done just what Donald had told him not to. But he had to say something. To get her through it. To get both of them through it.
To give her hope.
Yet he dreaded her next question.
“When?” she asked.
Murph took little for granted. He knew that, so he was prepared. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two wristwatches.
“One for you,” he said, and then pointed to the watch on his wrist. “One for me.”
She took the watch, turning it in her hand, examining it curiously.
“When I’m in hypersleep,” he explained, “or travel near the speed of light, or near a black hole, time will change for me. It’ll run more slowly.”
Murph frowned slightly.
“When I get back we can compare,” he said, then he waited.
He could almost see her brain working through it.
“Time will run differently for us?” she said. There was a hint of wonderment in her tone, and he felt a little flush of relief. If she could see this as an adventure, her adventure as well as his, and understand his promise…
“Yup,” he told her. “By the time I get back we might be the same age. You and me. Imagine that.”
He watched as her face changed, and he knew he’d made a mistake, said perhaps exactly the wrong thing.
“Wait, Murph—”
“You have no idea when you’re coming back,” she said angrily.
He gave her a pleading look. He needed something to say, but this was off his script.
“No idea at all!” she shouted, and she slung the watch across the room before turning her back on him again.
So quickly, what little momentum he’d had—or maybe just imagined he had—was gone. His plan, such as it was, was suddenly was in tatters, and there wasn’t any time to start over, even if he knew how.
“Don’t make me leave like this,” Cooper pleaded.
But her back stayed to him.
“Please,” he said. “I have to go now.” He reached to put his hand on her shoulder, but she angrily shook it off.
“I love you, Murph,” he said, finally. “Forever. And I’m coming back.”
Slowly he stood up. Everything about him felt heavy. He knew if he stayed another minute, another hour, another day, it would be the same. Either he was going, or he wasn’t. Murph would be okay, and in time she would understand.
