Interstellar, page 9
He fired the thrusters, easing their momentum toward the thing.
“No one knows,” Doyle said.
That didn’t sound very reassuring.
“But the others made it, right?” he asked.
“At least some of them,” Doyle replied.
Right, he thought. Some of them. He hadn’t thought to ask how many of the Lazarus pilots hadn’t sent back any signals at all, had just gone quiet after passing through the wormhole. And if it had been mentioned in one of the briefings, he must have missed it.
Or blanked it out.
“Thanks for the confidence boost,” Cooper said.
He took a deep breath, then, and let it out slowly.
“Everybody ready to say goodbye to the solar system?” he asked. “To our galaxy?”
Everyone seemed to understand that it was a rhetorical question, because no one answered. So without further comment, Cooper pushed the stick forward, nosing toward the anomaly and letting gravity have them, draw them toward the center of the wormhole.
Cooper realized he was holding his breath, waiting for some sort of impact, but of course there was nothing there to hit. Instead they simply crossed into it, and suddenly the Endurance was part of the distortion, its warped reflection coming towards them, passing through itself.
And the universe turned inside out.
Distorted images of space-time seemed to run off in every direction, Romilly’s paper bending not in three dimensions but in five, and it was happening at an ever-increasing speed, so everything was rushing by, accelerating at a dizzying pace. For the moment the Endurance seemed to be withstanding the elemental forces that lay beyond the hull. Cooper hoped it would stay that way.
He tried to grasp what it was his eyes were reporting. His brain told him they were racing along a sort of wall, a wall of stars and galaxies and nebulae streaking past at immense speeds. But if he shifted his gaze, it seemed more like a tunnel, albeit one that billowed out in the distance. He thought he could see an end to it, and yet that end didn’t seem to be getting any closer, as if it was withdrawing from them even more quickly than they rocketed toward it.
It was the most incredible thing Cooper had ever experienced, and like nothing he ever had or could have imagined. He wasn’t even sure he was going to be able to describe it later. But for now…
He looked down at his instruments. They were inert.
There was nothing there.
“They won’t help you in here,” Doyle said. “We’re cutting through the bulk, the space beyond our three dimensions.” He checked his own instruments. “All we can do is record and observe,” he concluded.
* * *
Back in the ring module Brand saw a sudden apparent ripple in the air itself, which swiftly multiplied into an undulating distortion inside the ship.
Bending toward her.
Moving.
“What is that?” Romilly gasped.
It was something of a relief to know that he saw it too.
She watched the distortion come, fascinated. It didn’t even occur to her to move. There was form there.
“I think…” she murmured, “I think it’s them.”
“Distorting space-time?” Romilly said.
Brand reached toward it.
“Don’t!” Romilly warned, as it touched her, and her hand began to ripple; like the air, like the wormhole. But she felt nothing, no pain.
Nothing but delight.
* * *
In the Ranger, Cooper saw they were at last reaching the light at the end of the tunnel. Yet it wasn’t one light, but many: star clusters and nebulae, galaxies and pulsars all getting closer and larger very quickly, much too quickly, impossibly fast…
And then they were out, the illusion of three dimensions snapping back into being, the rest of it folding away into the magical secret doors of the universe. It was sort of like watching a real person suddenly become a flat snapshot on paper. The image was recognizable, but depth and time—and the motion that time made possible—were all missing.
Only he didn’t have the words for what was missing now, or even the concepts that the words might identify.
On the console, the instruments suddenly came back to life now that there was something for them to sense—something to which they could react.
Cooper brought his eyes up again, and stared, awestruck to his core.
“We’re—here,” Doyle said.
* * *
Brand’s fingers were back to normal. The distortion was gone. But she kept staring at them.
“What was that?” Romilly asked her.
She touched her hand, remembering the presence, the sentience she had felt, out of phase, in different dimensions, but sharing the same space.
“The first handshake,” she replied.
SEVENTEEN
Earth’s sun was nowhere near the center of its galaxy, but was in a hinterland nearer the edge of it, where the stars were thin and distant from one another—a lonely house on a great plain.
Certainly not a condo in the city.
This place, this sky beyond the wormhole, this was more like New York. Or Chicago, at least. Stars blazed everywhere, some brightly enough to leave impressions on Cooper’s retinas. Gauzy nebulae draped between and among them, coloring whole quadrants of space with light refracted through gas and dust and the fresh brilliance of newly born stars.
From Earth, the only nebulae you could see with the naked eye were tiny dull smudges that looked like blurry stars. Here they hove up like thunderheads.
If their new home was indeed going to be here, it would have a much more interesting night sky. Probably a more interesting day sky, if it came to that.
I’m in another galaxy, he thought, trying to really grasp what had just happened. The closest star to Earth was so far away a light wave would take four years to travel between them. The nearest galaxy to Earth was two-and-a-half million light years away. Two-and-a-half million years for light to make the trip. This galaxy—this one could be anywhere.
If he had a telescope powerful enough to see home from here, he wouldn’t see his kids. Dinosaurs, maybe. Or trilobites. Or a cooling fireball. Or nothing, if he was more than five billion light years from Earth. Which he could easily be. According to Romilly, folding space a trillion light years would yield no longer a journey than folding it ten miles. But the distance after the fold—
That was real.
So to reach the planets on their itinerary, they still had to make their way through a lot of vacuum.
Far from home didn’t begin to describe how he felt in that moment.
* * *
Doyle studied his workstation. The initial maneuvering done, they were all back in the ring module, processing both their feelings and the data that was pouring in.
“The lost communications came through,” Doyle informed them.
“How?” Brand asked.
“The relay on this side cached them,” he explained, as he continued to parse through it.
“Years of basic data,” he added. “No real surprises. Miller’s site has kept pinging thumbs up, as has Mann’s… but Edmunds went down three years ago.”
“Transmitter failure?” Brand asked. Cooper heard the anxiety in her voice, and felt a little sorry for her.
“Maybe,” Doyle replied. “He was sending the thumbs up right till it went dark.”
“Miller still looks good?” Romilly asked.
As Doyle affirmed that, the astrophysicist began drawing a great big circle on a whiteboard.
“She’s coming up fast,” he said. “With one complication. The planet is much closer to Gargantua than we expected.”
“Gargantua?” Cooper said, not sure he liked the sound of it.
“A very large black hole,” Doyle explained. “Miller’s and Dr. Mann’s planets orbit it.”
Brand looked at the diagram Romilly was working on. If the big circle was the circumference of Gargantua, then the orbit he was tracing was pretty much the same.
“And Miller’s is on the horizon?” Brand said.
“A basketball around the hoop,” Romilly confirmed. “Landing there takes us dangerously close. A black hole that big has a huge gravitational pull.”
Cooper studied their grave faces, wondering why they were so concerned. It seemed easy enough for them to compensate.
“Look,” he said, “I can swing around that neutron star to decelerate—”
Brand cut him off.
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s time. That gravity will slow our clock, compared to Earth’s. Drastically.”
Cooper suddenly understood their expressions. Black holes did crazy things with time. He’d even mentioned that to Murph—but he had never believed it would actually be an issue he’d need to address.
As in many things, he had been wrong.
“How bad?” he asked, thinking that he most likely didn’t want to know.
“Every hour we spend on that planet will be maybe…” She did the mental computations. “Seven years back on Earth.”
“Jesus…” Cooper breathed.
“That’s relativity, folks,” Romilly said.
Cooper felt as if the floor had been pulled out from beneath his feet. All of a sudden Miller’s world seemed a helluva lot less hospitable.
“We can’t drop down there without considering the consequences,” he said.
“Cooper, we have a mission,” Doyle said.
“That’s easy for you to say,” Cooper returned. “You don’t have anyone back on Earth waiting for you, do you?”
“You have no idea what’s easy for me,” Doyle shot back, frowning.
Brand actually came to his aid, for once.
“Cooper’s right,” she said. “We have to think of time as a resource, just like oxygen and food. Going down there is going to cost us.”
Doyle relented, and stepped to the screen, a determined look on his face.
“Look,” he said. “Dr. Mann’s data looks promising, but we won’t get there for months. Edmunds’ is even further. Miller hasn’t sent much, but what she has sent is promising—water, organics.”
“You don’t find that every day,” Brand conceded.
“No, you do not,” Doyle agreed, his blue eyes flaring. “So think about the resources it would take to come back here…”
Yeah, Cooper granted. He’s got a point. In essence, getting from Miller’s planet to Mann’s would require climbing out of the deep gravitational well of Gargantua. It would be like swimming upstream, against the current. Which probably wouldn’t leave enough fuel for a return trip to Earth. If the choice was between getting back a little late and not getting back at all, he knew where he fell out.
“How far back from the planet would we have to stay to be out of the time shift?” Cooper asked.
Romilly pointed to his whiteboard drawing of the massive black hole and the planet skimming just above its horizon.
“Just back from the cusp,” he said.
“So we track a wider orbit of Gargantua,” Cooper said. “Parallel with Miller’s planet but a little further out… Take a Ranger down, grab Miller and her samples, debrief, and analyze back here.”
“That’ll work,” Brand said.
“No time for monkey business or chitchat down there,” Cooper emphasized. “Tars, you’d better wait up here. Who else?”
Romilly lifted his head.
“If we’re talking about a couple of years—I’d use that time to work on gravity—observations from the wormhole,” he said. “This is gold to Professor Brand.”
A couple of years, Cooper thought. He glanced at Romilly, and wondered if the man really understood what he was saying. He would be here—alone—for years. Of the four of them, Romilly had proven the least comfortable in space, the most susceptible to its physical and psychological perils.
Yet he would also be the least useful on the surface, and the most useful up here.
It felt like a huge decision to make in so little time, and not just because of Romilly.
Like Brand said, though, time was as much a resource to them as air. It wasn’t just seeing his kids again. If they lost too much time, there would be no human race to save, except for the embryos they’d brought with them. End result: no plan A.
And he was determined that there would be a plan A, come hell or high water.
“Okay,” he said. “Tars, factor an orbit of Gargantua—minimal thrusting, conserve fuel—but stay in range.”
“Don’t worry,” Tars said. “I wouldn’t leave you behind…” Abruptly he turned away from Cooper. “…Dr. Brand,” he finished, with a comic’s timing.
Cooper wondered if it might be a good idea to bring the robot’s humor setting down another notch or two.
* * *
Amelia Brand considered the black hole.
If the wormhole was a three-dimensional hole you could see through—albeit in a distorted fashion—Gargantua was a three-dimensional hole into nothing.
The average black hole had in some distant past been a star, and probably a really big one, merrily fusing hydrogen into helium, pushing enough energy out to keep its own gravity from making it collapse. But eventually, over billions of years, the hydrogen had all burned out, and it had to start using helium for fuel. And when the helium was all gone, it turned to progressively heavier and heavier elements.
Until one day it lost its fight with the gravity it had itself created. The force keeping it shining and inflated wasn’t enough to counter its mass. So it collapsed, victorious gravity crushing its atoms into denser and denser substances until finally crushing the atoms themselves in neutrons. The physical size of the star became less and less, but its gravity grew exponentially. In the end, even light couldn’t escape its pull, but it could still grow, swallowing nebulae, planets, stars.
Yet Gargantua was anything but “average.” Formed when the universe was young, perhaps at the center of a galaxy, it may have been the product of many smaller black holes, merging until its mass was at least a hundred million times that of the Earth’s sun.
Present-day Gargantua was frightening in its seeming nothingness. Yet past its horizon, past the point of no return, beyond which even light could not come back, Amelia could see an effect—a glowing disk surrounded the black hole, gas and particles captured by the immense gravity, whirling around it like water going down a spherical drain. So incredibly fast was the spin that the atoms collided with one another, hurling bursts of energy into the cloud, quickening it with light and blowing like a wind back out through the disk, creating plasma arabesques of breathtaking beauty.
But deeper, where that eldritch, glowing shroud met the Gargantua’s event horizon… was a horrifying nothingness.
“A literal heart of darkness,” Doyle said.
That didn’t seem sufficient to Amelia—as if the man was damning Gargantua with faint praise. She pointed, drawing his gaze from the terrifying naught of the black hole to a small, glowing point.
“That’s Miller’s planet,” she said.
* * *
Cooper turned to Case, the robot, who was riding shotgun in the copilot’s seat.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yup,” the robot replied.
“Don’t say much, do you?” Cooper said wryly.
“Tars talks plenty for both of us,” Case said.
Cooper chuckled, and threw a switch.
“Detach,” he said. Then he watched as the ring module seemed to drift away from them, and felt a moment’s hesitation.
Then Gargantua took hold of them, and they were suddenly streaking away from Endurance, ridiculously fast.
“Romilly, you reading these forces?” he asked, not quite believing what he was seeing.
“Unbelievable.” Romilly’s words crackled over the radio, but even from this distance, Cooper could hear the excitement in his voice. “If we could see the collapsed star inside, the singularity, we’d solve gravity.”
Cooper gazed down at the gaping black wound in the universe.
“No way to get anything from it?” he asked.
“Nothing escapes the horizon,” Romilly replied. “Not even light. The answer’s there, there’s just no way to see it.”
Cooper fastened his attention on the blue marble skimming along Gargantua’s event horizon, because it was coming up fast. He ran the trajectory one more time.
“This is fast for atmospheric entry,” Case noticed. “Should we use the thrusters to slow?”
“We’re gonna use the Ranger’s aerodynamics to save fuel,” Cooper told the machine.
“Airbrake?” Case said. Cooper noted for future reference that Case apparently had an “are you kidding me?” setting.
“Wanna get in fast, don’t we?” he replied.
“Brand, Doyle, get ready,” Case said. A robot couldn’t be nervous, Cooper knew, but somehow this one sounded anxious.
He watched the planet below. From a distance it hadn’t looked so different from Earth, but as they drew closer, he could see that it was much—well—bluer. He tried to pick out features—continents, islands—but all he could make out were clouds.
Then they reached the outskirts of the atmosphere and he didn’t have any attention to spare.
It started like a whisper, air so thin it would pass as vacuum compared to sea-level air on Earth. But at the speed they were traveling, those few molecules were compressed enough to make them practically much denser in their interaction with the plummeting vessel. That was good, actually, because this way they could ease into the atmosphere.
Well, maybe not ease, he thought, as the ship began to shudder and the air outside shrieked in protest. The Ranger’s nose began to glow as the friction from the atmosphere mounted, and every weld in the craft seemed to object as he tried to flatten out their course a bit, to engage the atmosphere like a jet, rather than a meteorite.
Cooper glanced at his instruments, and then back at the horizon.
“We could ease—” Case began.
“Hands where I can see them, Case!” Cooper shouted. “Only time I ever went down was a machine easing at the wrong moment.”
“A little caution,” Case pleaded.
