Interstellar, page 8
“Nature can’t be evil?” Cooper said.
“Formidable,” Brand said. “Frightening—not evil. Is a tiger evil because it rips a gazelle to pieces?”
Cooper reflected on that. If you were the gazelle, he mused, it was a moot point what was going on in the tiger’s heart and soul—whether it was evil, or just staying alive. Plenty of human beings had justified immensely evil acts in the name of survival and the “natural order of things.”
“Just what we bring with us then,” he said. He didn’t want to get into a real argument, but stubbornly found himself unwilling to let the point slide past completely.
Apparently she noticed.
“This crew represents the best aspects of humanity,” Brand said, a little testily, but he let it go. Why start the trip with a pointless philosophical argument? They had to live with one another for a long time.
In fact, he realized, what they had—along with Romilly and Doyle—was a lot like a marriage. They had to make it work, and they didn’t have the recourse of separation or divorce if things started to get unpleasant. Friction had to be kept at a minimum.
“Even me?” Cooper asked, trying to lighten things back up.
Brand smiled.
“Hey, we agreed,” she said. “Ninety percent.” With that she went to her own cryo-bed. Cooper returned his gaze to the infinite space outside of the ship.
“Don’t stay up too late,” Brand instructed. “We can’t spare the resources.”
“Hey,” Cooper objected with mock chagrin. “I’ve been waiting a long time to be up here.”
“You are literally wasting your breath,” she said. She got into the bed and lay down. The lid slid shut over her, encasing her in a plastic sheath. Liquid began filling in around the plastic, where it would freeze into a shield that would help protect her from the two years’ worth of radiation that would sleet through the hull as she slept.
Sweet dreams, he wished her, and wondered if one did in fact dream in cryo-sleep.
Cooper turned away and went to join Tars.
“Show me the trajectory again,” he told the machine. A diagram appeared on the screen.
“Eight months to Mars,” Tars said, “just like the last time we talked about it. Then counter-orbital slingshot around—”
Cooper saw Brand’s bed darken, then begin withdrawing into the deck.
“Tars,” he interrupted, speaking in a whisper. After all, he’d seen the trajectory so often he could draw it blindfolded. He didn’t need a bedtime review. But there was something about the… social situation on board, and a bit of pertinent information he needed to figure out.
Purely for sociological reasons.
“Tars,” he began, “was Dr. Brand—”
“Why are you whispering?” Tars asked. “You can’t wake them.”
He had been whispering, hadn’t he? Why? He knew Tars was right.
Was he embarrassed?
Nah, he decided. Just being considerate. And this might be important.
Later.
“Were Dr. Brand and Edmunds… close?” he asked carefully.
“I wouldn’t know,” Tars replied.
“Is that ninety percent, or ten percent ‘wouldn’t know?’” Cooper pursued.
“I also have a discretion setting,” the robot informed him.
“So I gather,” Cooper replied. He stood up. “But not a poker face.”
With that he dragged himself reluctantly to the comm station. Everyone else had recorded their goodbyes, but he still didn’t know what he was going to say, how he was going to say it. And probably, he had to admit, that was because there was no right thing to say.
Yet he had to say something. So after a few moments of hemming and hawing, he tapped the control.
“Hey, guys,” he finally began. “I’m about to settle down for a long nap, so I figured I’d send you an update.” He looked again at the dwindling jewel of the planet, apparently spinning due to the Endurance’s rotation.
“The Earth looks amazing from here. You can’t see any of the dust. I hope you guys are doing great. This should get to you okay. Professor Brand said he’d make sure of it.” He paused, aching to say more, something that could wipe away his farewell to Murph, and make everything okay.
But he couldn’t come up with anything.
“Guess I’ll say goodnight,” he finished instead.
FIFTEEN
Donald sat on the porch looking out over the cornfields. Dust and heat made the horizon shimmer—which wasn’t unusual—but between there and him, something else was coming. In time he saw it was a pair of vehicles.
One of them was Cooper’s truck. He hoped…
Then he sighed as the door burst open, and Murph came running out. Of course she had seen them coming. The way she stayed at that window…
“Is it him?” she asked softly.
“I don’t think so, Murph,” he replied. He could have answered unconditionally, but chose not to. Coop had left her in tears. That had been the hard part for him, leaving his daughter while she was so upset. Yet Donald had known when his son-in-law had left that if he didn’t turn around in the first five minutes, he was never coming back. But he hadn’t, and he wasn’t. That Murph still hoped showed that she didn’t understand her father as well as Donald did.
He stood up to meet the truck as it pulled up to the house. A man with a decade or so more years than Donald stepped out. He had a look about him, and Donald guessed it was probably the Professor Brand fellow Coop had mentioned.
“You must be Donald,” the man said. Then he looked at the girl. “Hello, Murph.”
“Why’re you in my dad’s truck?” she demanded.
“He wanted me to bring it for your brother,” the man explained.
Murph didn’t reply, and after an awkward silence, the man reached for a briefcase.
“He sent you a message—”
But Murph wasn’t having any of that, Donald knew. She spun on her heel and bolted back into the house.
The man hesitated for a moment, then pulled out a disk. He held it out toward Donald, who took it.
“Pretty upset with him for leaving,” Donald explained. It was an understatement, but there was no point in being particular, not with these people, this guy.
“If you record messages,” the man said, “I’ll transmit them to Cooper.”
Donald nodded, looking up at the house, thinking that Murph would never do it. He’d bet the farm on it.
“Murph’s a bright spark,” the man said, following his gaze. “Maybe I could fan the flame.”
Donald looked at him, gauged the man’s expression, and saw that he was serious. He had something in mind. Then he thought about Murph, still in school, becoming angrier and more belligerent—until she got expelled.
And then what?
“She’s already making fools out of her teachers,” Donald said. “She should come make a fool out of you.”
The man grinned. Donald liked that.
He looked up into the sky.
“Where are they?” he asked.
“Heading toward Mars,” the man replied. “The next time we hear from Cooper, they’ll be coming up on Saturn.”
Donald nodded.
Godspeed, Coop, he thought. Hope you find what you’re looking for. I hope it’s worth it. Worth what you left.
Murph might see Cooper again. Donald was pretty sure he never would.
He sighed. He’d already done the father thing, hadn’t he? Put in his time?
He was tired.
Count your blessings, old man, he thought to himself. Some men never even live to see their grandchildren. There was so little left that had any value to him. Only Murph and Tom, really. What did he have to complain about?
He would rest when he was dead.
SIXTEEN
Mars had been an object of fascination from the earliest days of modern astronomy, in part because it seemed so Earthlike.
Whole civilizations had risen on the red planet—in the imaginations of Lowell, Wells, Weinbaum, Burroughs, and so many other famous authors. Those civilizations had all fallen when the first robotic landers reported the dull truth. If Mars had ever been a place habitable by human beings—or anything like them—it had been a very long time ago. And if there was life there now, it was hiding itself very, very well.
Which is why they had left it behind. Mars wasn’t going to be humanity’s new home, any more than the Moon was.
Saturn had held the attention and wonder of the world for centuries, as well, but while Mars had done so because it was so Earthlike, Saturn caught the eye because it was so incredibly weird. In movies, in fiction, if you wanted to make clear a planet was really alien, you put rings around it. It was huge, as well, with an atmosphere of mostly hydrogen and helium and clouds of ammonia crystals. No home for humanity there, either, but beauty in plenty, with those bands of ice glittering in the cold light of a distant sun.
Cooper checked his instruments. Dropping into orbit, the Endurance became newest of more than one hundred and fifty moons that circled the gas giant—and that wasn’t counting the trillions of ice gems that made up the rings.
Or the object of their mission.
He checked the controls again and then went to the comm booth.
Two years.
He wanted to see his kids.
* * *
“…but they said I can start advanced agriculture a year early,” Tom said, as Cooper sat in the comm booth. He was listening, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
It was weird watching him change. Several recordings had been sent, the first just after Cooper went into cryosleep, and the most recent just a few days ago. They were so far away from Earth now that it took around eighty-four minutes for light—or a radio wave—to make the trip, making real-time conversations impossible, since that would mean a lag of nearly three hours between, “Hi, how are you?” and, “I’m good, how about you?”
In space, distance was time, and time was distance.
Tom mostly talked about the farm. He’d had a little trouble with Boots taking him seriously, but Donald had helped him iron that out. He’d met a girl, but that only lasted a few months. Cooper wasn’t surprised—he remembered the girl, an only child and a bit of a spoiled princess. Not that people couldn’t change, but sometimes there was a whole lot of inertia to overcome if that was to happen.
Tom had managed to repurpose the drone, which was good, because soon after Cooper left, the farm had lost a third of its solar panels in a black blizzard that had lasted almost thirty hours straight. The good news—according to his son—was that the government considered the storm to be a turning point. From here on out, they claimed, the environment would get better.
He wasn’t sure he believed it, but hope was hope.
By the last message, there was a lot less boy in Tom and a lot more man. Donald had been right about him. He was doing fine. Better than fine—he was thriving on the responsibility. Making the farm his farm.
“Got to go, Dad,” his son finished up. “Hope you’re safe up there.” He shuffled aside and Donald appeared, a little more grey, looking a little more weary. Cooper felt a twinge of guilt at having left him to shoulder so much.
“I’m sorry, Coop,” he said, as he had in all of the messages. “I asked Murph to say hi, but she’s as stubborn as her old man. I’ll try again next time. Stay safe.”
That was the end of it. He wondered what Murph looked like now, how twelve would lay differently from ten on her face. Would he see more of her mother there, or more of himself? Or would she look more like that part that was just Murph?
He wasn’t going to find out, not this time. Maybe not ever. If she hadn’t forgiven him in two years…
Sighing, he put in some ear buds and left the booth.
* * *
Romilly was in the habitat module, looking particularly pensive and unhappy. Cooper hoped his nausea hadn’t returned. When it hit him, it was bad.
“You good, Rom?” he asked.
“It gets to me, Coop,” Romilly admitted. “This tin can. Radiation, vacuum outside—everything wants us dead. We’re just not supposed to be here.” He shook his head and looked miserable.
Cooper regarded the astrophysicist. He was the youngest member of the crew, and certainly the most highly strung. He would probably be better off behind a telescope than jetting off into space, but there weren’t that many astronomers, mathematicians—scientists of any sort—left in the world. NASA poached what talent they could find from the few colleges that remained, but Cooper knew first-hand how few and rarified a group that represented. And given that kids were being taught that the American space program had been Cold War propaganda, he doubted the brain pool was getting any deeper.
No, they were lucky to have Romilly.
As long as he didn’t freak out.
That had always been one of the greatest concerns regarding long-term space exploration. They’d offset the detrimental effects of prolonged weightlessness, at least to an acceptable degree. But the potential for mental deterioration could never be eliminated as a factor.
“We’re explorers, Rom,” he told him, trying for reassurance. “On the greatest ocean of all.”
Romilly just banged his fist against the hull of the ship. The sound it made was strangely flat.
“Millimeters of aluminum—that’s it,” he declared. “And nothing within millions of miles that won’t kill us in seconds.”
He wasn’t wrong there, Cooper knew. It also wasn’t the point.
“A lot of the finest solo yachtsmen couldn’t swim,” he replied. “They knew if they fell overboard, that was it, anyway. This is no different.”
Romilly seemed to chew on that without finding much to like in it. After a moment, Cooper passed him his ear buds, emitting the sounds of a thunderstorm: the pounding of the rain, the crack of lightning splitting the sky, the cricking and croaking of frogs.
“Here,” he said, hoping it would relax Romilly the way it did him.
It was way too early for any of them to start losing it.
* * *
The magnificence of Saturn filled most of Cooper’s field of vision, but it wasn’t what held his attention. Instead he was looking over Doyle’s shoulder as he parsed through a series of images. All were star fields which looked as if they had been photographed through a fish-eye lens.
“From the relay probe?” Cooper asked.
“It was in orbit around the wormhole,” Doyle confirmed. “Each time it swung around, we got images of the other side of the foreign galaxy.”
“Like swinging a periscope around,” Cooper said.
“Exactly,” Doyle replied.
“So we’ve got a pretty good idea what we’re gonna find on the other side?” Cooper asked.
“Navigationally,” Doyle said, as Brand came up from behind.
“We’ll be coming up on the wormhole in less than forty-five,” she said. “Suit up.”
* * *
Cooper strapped into the Ranger cockpit, gazing out at the space beyond Saturn as Romilly came into the cockpit, excitement plain on his face.
Cooper keyed the radio.
“Strap in,” he told the others. “I’m killing the spin.”
He began firing controlled bursts from the engines, pushing against the direction of rotation. Slowly but inexorably the motion slowed, until the Endurance was motionless—at least relative to its own axis. And as they ground to a halt, the peculiar belly-tickle of free-fall returned.
Ahead of them, Cooper made out a distorted patch of stars, and he felt a thrill of mixed fear and wonder tremor up his spine. This was why they were here, this improbable thing.
“There!” Romilly said energetically. “That’s the wormhole.”
“Say it, don’t spray it, Nikolai,” Cooper responded, trying to keep things on an even keel. But Romilly’s enthusiasm was undeterred.
“Cooper, this is a portal, cutting through space-time,” he said. “We’re seeing the heart of a galaxy so far away we don’t even know where it is in the universe.”
Cooper stared at the thing, the astrophysicist’s words doing a slow turn in his head.
“It’s a sphere,” he noticed.
“Of course it is,” Romilly said. “You thought it would be just a hole?”
Cooper suddenly felt like he was being called on to show his homework on the board—when he hadn’t done it.
“No,” he floundered. “Well, in all the illustrations…”
Romilly grabbed a piece of paper and drew two points on it, far from each other. He seemed delighted to have the opportunity to explain it all.
“In the illustrations, they’re trying to show you how it works,” he said, poking a hole in one of the points with his pen. “So they say, ‘you wanna go from here to there, but it’s too far?’ A wormhole bends space like this—”
He folded the paper so the hole overlapped with the second point, then stuck his pen through both, joining them.
“—so you can take a shortcut across a higher dimension. But to show that, they’ve turned three-dimensional space—” He gestured around at the cockpit, then held up the paper. “—into two dimensions. Which turns the wormhole into two dimensions… a circle.”
He looked at Cooper, expecting a response.
“But what’s a circle in three dimensions?” he prompted.
“A sphere,” Cooper replied, suddenly getting it.
“Exactly,” Romilly agreed, pointing toward their destination. “It’s a spherical hole.”
Cooper ruminated on that as the “spherical hole” loomed larger and larger.
“And who put it there?” Romilly continued, not ready to give it a rest. “Who do we thank?”
“I’m not thanking anyone till we get through it in one piece,” Cooper replied.
* * *
“Is there any trick to this?” Cooper asked Doyle, who had replaced Romilly in the cockpit. Ahead of them, he could see the quavering stars of the other galaxy, swinging in opposition to them as they moved. It was sort of like looking into a giant shaving mirror, and it was—to say the least—disorienting.
