Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization (16 page)

Now, shockingly, she saw that it was gone, or almost so. He seemed tiny in the hospital bed, dwarfed by the machines monitoring him and keeping him alive. When she reached his bedside, she could barely hear his breathing.

“Murph? Murph,” he murmured.

She took his hand.

This isn’t happening
, she thought.
I’m not ready for this.

“I’m here, Professor,” she said.

“I don’t have much life…” He gasped for another breath. “I have to tell you…”

“Try to take it easy,” Murph said.

“All these… years. All these people… counted on me.”

“It’s okay, Professor,” she reassured him.

“I let… you all… down.”

“No,” Murph said, close to crying. “I’ll finish what you started.”

He looked up at her, tears welling over the failing light in his eyes.

“Murph,” he said. “Good, good, Murph. I told you to have faith… to believe…”

“I do believe,” Murph told him.

“I needed you to believe your father was coming back,” he said.

“I do, Professor,” she said.

“Forgive me, Murph,” he said.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” she said. But there was such anguish on his face, such abject shame. After all he had done, how could he feel like this? It wasn’t fair that he should die feeling as if he was a failure.

“I
lied
, Murph,” he sighed.

She blinked, wondering what the hell he could mean. Lied about what?

“I lied to you,” he went on. “There’s no reason to come back… no way to help us…”

“But plan A,” she said, confused. “All this—all these people—the equation!”

He slowly turned his head from side to side, tears streaming down his face. Then he sighed again, and his eyes weren’t looking at her anymore. His breath ebbed out slowly, and when it was time to draw another, his chest hardly moved.

“Did he know?” she whispered, desperately. “Did my dad know? Did he abandon me?”

His lips moved as he tried to say something else.

She leaned closer.

“Do… not… go… gentle… into…

“Into…”

“No!” she shouted. “No! Professor, stay! You can’t. You can’t leave!”

Getty was suddenly there.

“You can’t,” she said. “You can’t, you…”

Getty put his hand gently on her shoulder, and together they watched the life leave Professor Brand. Her question still floated around her, with no answer coming.

TWENTY-THREE

By the time Murph got up the nerve to send a message to Professor Brand’s daughter, her grief and confusion had become something else altogether.

“Dr. Brand,” she began, trying to stay in control, to keep her voice even and professional. “I’m sorry to tell you that your father died today. He had no pain and was… at peace.” She paused and added, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

She reached for the switch, to leave the lie where it lay. Odds were Brand would never hear the message, and if she did—well, she was in space, far from home. She would need comfort, and…

Murph pulled her hand back.

Amelia was his daughter. His
daughter
, part of the whole thing. She had trusted her father, and he had betrayed her so completely—her father had left her. Who and what was there left for her to trust?

Professor Brand had been a liar. She was not.

At peace, my ass
, she thought bitterly.
He died in agony for what he had done.
And if when he stopped breathing he did find some sort of peace, he didn’t deserve it.

And he hadn’t answered her goddamn question, hadn’t given her the only answer she cared about. No, he had used his last freaking breath to freaking quote Dylan Thomas one last freaking time.

“Did you know, Brand?” she shouted. “Did he tell you? Did you know that plan A was a sham? You knew, didn’t you? You left us here. To die.

“Never coming back…”

* * *

On the
Endurance
, Case registered Murph’s angry message as he watched the Ranger dwindle, carrying the others to the white world beyond the cockpit glass.

TWENTY-FOUR

Cooper studied Mann’s world as they approached the cloud cover, which looked for all the world like the fluffy cumulonimbus clouds of Earth—majestic and white, with high, curved peaks and deep, shadowy valleys. That seemed like a good sign, although they were so thick that he couldn’t see anything beneath them.

As they drew even nearer, he began to worry. What the heads-up display was telling him about the density of these clouds seemed… unreasonable. Nevertheless, he killed most of their downward velocity, hoping the instruments were wrong, yet unwilling to take chances.

Not after Miller’s world.

He banked, cutting through one of the clouds, which to his relief seemed to be entirely normal. Maybe it
was
the instruments that were screwy.

But as they entered the next one, a horrible shudder went through the Ranger. There was a terrible scraping sound as they lost some of the thermo panels on the wing.

Goddammit
, he thought.
Why can’t anything just be what it seems to be?
Just as the mountains on Miller’s world hadn’t been mountains, most of these clouds weren’t just clouds. They were formations of frozen carbon dioxide—dry ice—sublimating to create a deceptively delicate sheath of vapor around them.

Grateful that he had trusted his gut, and not gone plowing straight into them, he banked again. He picked his way gingerly, proceeding as if through a frozen minefield, taking direction from Tars. And always following the beacon.

As a kid he’d once flown cross-country on a commercial airliner. Back then, as they passed through and above a wonderland of clouds, he had fantasized about being able to walk on them, ride them across the sky.

It looked like he would get his chance.

Be careful what you wish for
, he mused.

They approached the beacon. The signal was coming from high on a frozen cloud mountain. Cooper gave the radar profile a quick once-over, and was convinced that he didn’t want to park right next to it. The icy platform it presented was too small and unstable. Instead, he settled for a larger, flatter, denser stretch a little below it.

* * *

Once down, they began fastening their helmets, but without the blind rush that had driven them on Miller’s world. They were well beyond Gargantua’s time-bending zone, so there was no point in charging headlong into things. He took a good long scan around them to make sure something nasty wasn’t coming up from beneath, dropping down from above, or sneaking in from the sides.

Still, there wasn’t a lot of time to waste, so once he felt pretty secure about the stability of their perch, Tars opened the hatch. Stepping carefully out of the airlock and onto the ice, the four of them began hiking up-slope toward the beacon, Tars bringing up the rear. Cooper hoped desperately that they weren’t in for another game of hide and seek.

But when he crested the ridge he saw it instantly—an orange smudge nestled in the drifts of ice-shatter. He picked up his pace, and soon was gazing at the iced-over form of a Lazarus pod. Tars moved up behind him and began to dig it out, while Cooper prepared for the worst. Mann could easily be as dead as Miller, except this time there would be a body to view. He glanced at Brand and Romilly, and saw the same dread hanging on their expressions.

Once the craft’s airlock was clear and open, Cooper stepped in cautiously. The cabin was empty of life, eerie in the faint blue light filtering through the icy windows. Then Tars powered the module up and the lights came on. Cooper saw the cryo-chamber and moved toward it, as Tars clanked along behind him. With his gloved hand he brushed ice from the nameplate.

Dr. Mann, it read.

After a quick status check, Tars activated the cryo-chamber, and the ice began to melt. While he did that, Cooper shut the airlock again. Once it was sealed and the air cycled, he doffed his helmet. The air was stale, but breathable, and tinged with the slight acrid scent of ammonia. There was a mechanical robot, like Tars and Case, lying off to one side, dismantled.

After a short time the cryo-bed signaled all was ready, and Cooper cracked the lid open, revealing the plastic-shrouded figure inside. He was still ready for the worst. The water around the body was now a bit warm, and vapor drifted up into the chilly air.

Cooper found the seal in the plastic, and ripped it open.

A man about his own age lay there. His squared-off face was strong even in sleep, but as Cooper watched, his eyes flickered open, blue, at first without focus, looking at nothing. Then—confused and maybe frightened—he reached for Cooper with trembling hands and grabbed him, embraced him cheek to cheek.

Mann began sobbing, caressing Cooper’s face as if it was the face of his mother. Cooper didn’t mind, and was in fact overwhelmed by a deep compassion for the man. Unable to even imagine what he was feeling, he just held him tightly, the way he had held his kids when they woke from a nightmare.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

* * *

“Pray you never learn just how good it can be, just to see another face.”

Mann spoke in a husky voice. His hands shook his mug of tea as he took a sip from it. He looked from face to face, as if each was the most amazing thing he had ever seen.

“I hadn’t much hope to begin with,” he went on. “After so much time, I had none. My supplies were exhausted. The last time I went to sleep, I set no waking date. You have literally raised me from the dead.”

Cooper shot him a smile.

“Lazarus,” he said.

Mann nodded, then flicked his eyes up.

“And the others?” he asked.

“I’m afraid you’re it, sir,” Romilly said.

Mann looked a little stunned.

“So
far
, surely?” Mann said hopefully.

“With our situation,” Cooper told him, “there’s not much hope of any other rescue.”

It was almost as if Cooper had punched him. Mann looked down at his tea, dazed by grief. They let him have his moment of silence.

“Dr. Mann,” Brand said, after a bit, “tell us about your world.”

“My world,” he said softly. “Yes.
Our
world, we hope. Our world is cold, stark, but undeniably beautiful…”

* * *

“The days are sixty-seven cold hours,” Mann told them. “The nights are sixty-seven far colder hours…”

He turned and led them back toward the shelter of his landing craft.

“The gravity is a very pleasant eighty percent of Earth’s,” he said. “Up here, where I landed, the ‘water’ is alkali and the ‘air’ has too much ammonia in it to breathe for more than a few minutes. But down on the surface—and there is a surface—the ammonia gives way to crystalline hydrocarbons and breathable air. To organics. Possibly even to life. Yes, we may be sharing this world.”

Brand began checking Mann’s data, and the more she read, the more she seemed positively giddy. Finally she looked up from the screen.

“These readings are from the surface?” she asked, as if it didn’t seem real.

“Over the years I’ve dropped various probes,” Mann confirmed.

“How far have you explored?” Cooper asked.

“I’ve mounted several major expeditions,” Mann said. “But with oxygen in limited supply, Kipp there had to do most of the legwork.” He indicated the machine that could have been a brother to Tars or Case, except that it was lying about in various pieces.

“What’s wrong with him?” Tars asked.

“Degeneration,” Mann replied. “He misidentified the first organics we found as ammonia crystals. We struggled on for a time, but ultimately I decommissioned him and used his power source to keep the mission going.” He shook his head sadly. “I thought I was alone
before
I shut him down.”

“Would you like me to look at him?” Tars asked.

“No,” Mann said. “He needs a human touch.”

Tars didn’t reply. Instead he turned abruptly to Brand.

“Dr. Brand,” he said, “Case is relaying a message for you from the comm station.”

She nodded, and Tars began the playback on his data screen.

Cooper’s stomach clenched as the face of a woman appeared. It took a moment for him to recognize it as the face of his daughter.

Murph!

But she wasn’t calling
him
, she was calling Brand, and worse, Murph was delivering the news that Brand’s father was dead. He couldn’t tell which of the two women seemed more upset at the news, but it looked as if it was Murph.

“He had no pain and was… at peace,” she was saying. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Is that Murph?” Brand asked in an abstract voice.

Cooper nodded and tried to think of something to say as he watched Murph reach to turn the camera off.

“She’s become a—” Brand began, but she didn’t finish, because Murph didn’t turn off the camera. She pulled her hand back, and a strange look came over her. Anger, instant and intense.

“Did you know, Brand?” Murph demanded furiously. “Did he tell you? That plan A was a sham? You knew, didn’t you? You left us here. To die.

“Never coming back…”

Stunned, Cooper stared at Brand’s face, watched the shock run across it. He wanted to ask what the
hell
she was talking about, but couldn’t find the words.

“You left us here to set up your colony,” Murph went on, tears starting down her cheeks. He stared aghast as she struggled with her next words, and he knew. He knew what she was going to ask.

As quickly as it had appeared, the anger was gone, and her voice became very small.

“Did my father know?” she asked. “Dad…?”

And somehow, over impossible distance and through strange, twisted time, she was looking straight into his eyes.

“Did you leave me here to die?”

Then the screen did go dark, and he felt the whole of himself ache and he knew it was true, that he should have known. Should
always
have known.

Suddenly he realized that Brand was staring at him.

“Cooper,” she said, “my father devoted his whole life to plan A. I have no idea what she means—”