Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization (22 page)

She wondered how many children she and Cooper would be able to manage, now that it was just the two of them. Five? Ten?

At least he had some experience along those lines.

You want a big family, Coop
? It was going to be an odd conversation to have.
Probably a painful one, too—at least for him.

It all might simply be moot, anyway—the
Endurance
might not be able to take them
anywhere
, given the damage she had suffered. And even if she could, what if Edmunds’ planet was no better than the others?

What if “they”—whoever the mysterious architects were—had been playing a cruel joke all along? Or, perhaps worse, hadn’t possessed any real concept of what human beings needed when it came to settling a new home?

If the average person were asked to find a new environment suitable for the chemosynthetic bacteria that lived around deep-sea thermal vents, would they know where to start? And would the difference between such bacteria and
Homo sapiens
be significant to beings who lived in five dimensions and spoke with gravity? Perhaps not. Some life from Earth would live just fine on either Miller’s planet or Mann’s.

Just not human life. And if they were wrong about two planets—no, strike that—eleven planets, counting those visited by Lazarus astronauts who had found their systems completely wanting—why shouldn’t they be wrong about
all
of them? If they really knew what they were doing, why couldn’t they have pointed humanity to the one right world for them?

But then she remembered the distorted image in the ship as they passed through the wormhole,—and she couldn’t bring herself to believe that there was any sort of deception involved. And she still had faith in Wolf, in his planet—believed everything she had said that day, trying to persuade Cooper and Romilly that their best course was the one that led to his world.

Edmunds’ planet was where they needed to be. They just had to get there. Which, to her, no longer seemed likely.

She waited for what Cooper had come to say.

* * *

He stopped within arm’s reach of her. They were both sealed in their spacesuits, yet it felt very—personal.

“The navigation mainframe’s destroyed,” he said, “And we don’t have enough life support to make it back to Earth.

“But…” he added, “We might scrape to Edmunds’ planet.”

So much had gone wrong that Amelia accepted his words with genuine caution. She tried to read his tone, his expression. She knew this had to be devastating for him, and the relief—no, happiness—that threatened to overwhelm her had to be kept in check. She couldn’t let him see it. Wolf might be alive, or he might be dead. But to know, to know for certain—there was freedom in that.

There was closure, which she desperately needed. If she was to move on with plan B—if that was to be the sum of her remaining life, she needed to know. And if she was wrong about Edmunds’ world—well then, they were done. One way or another, their journey would finally be over. For her, that would be closure of another sort.

As for Cooper, she knew in her heart that no possible outcome would bring him solace. That tinged her inner elation with sadness.

“What about fuel?” she asked, trying to stick to the practical aspects of the situation, to keep her emotions at bay.

“Not enough,” Cooper said. He smiled. “But I’ve got a plan. Let Gargantua suck us right to her horizon—then a powered slingshot around to launch us at Edmunds.” He explained it so easily that he might as well have been talking about taking a ride in a pickup truck.
Sure, I’ll just spin the wheel around like this, and downshift
’
er…

Yet she knew it wasn’t that easy.

“Manually?” Amelia questioned. Cooper had shown that he was a great pilot, but he was still only human. To slingshot around a black hole—without the mainframe? The tiniest mistake would see them dragged through Gargantua’s horizon and into its singularity.

“That’s what I’m here for,” Cooper said confidently. “I’ll take us just inside the critical orbit.” He said it like he expected her to believe him, and to her surprise, she realized she did. He could do it. And if he couldn’t—well, what the hell. They probably wouldn’t feel a thing, anyway.

“And the time slippage?” she asked softly.

His mouth turned in a melancholy little smile, and she saw traces of his grief.

“Neither of us can afford to worry about relativity right now,” he said, and she saw something else in his expression. A sort of tranquility, as if in his sorrow he had found some kind of peace.

“I’m sorry Cooper,” she said, and hardly thinking about it, she reached to embrace him. They were both in spacesuits, of course, so there was little physical sensation, but it still felt natural. They touched their faceplates together, and the moment seemed to linger.

THIRTY-TWO

Once again they fell toward the Gargantua’s yawning nothingness. In the remaining Ranger, Cooper sat sorting himself, preparing. He watched as Tars separated the lander from the battered
Endurance
.

He wished he’d had a few more moments with his children. Every second, gold in his hand.

* * *

The slingshot effect was nothing new. Comets had been doing it since stars were formed. As for humans, it had been used almost as long as there had been interplanetary travel.
Mariner 10
had been the first to employ it, sending the unmanned spacecraft past Venus to explore Mercury, followed by
Voyager
and
Galileo
.

You basically sent a spacecraft falling toward a much bigger body—say, a planet. The craft picked up speed as it “fell” toward the planet, whipped around it in a very tight pass, and then used the speed it had gained falling toward the planet to escape its gravitational pull, moving on a very different trajectory. And since the planet was in motion, the spacecraft could pick up the planet’s orbital speed, adding it to its own velocity. In this way you both changed course and increased speed toward another, final target without ever having burned an ounce of fuel.

That was what Cooper intended to do with Gargantua.

Of course, Gargantua wasn’t a planet, or even—in the conventional sense—a star. And if it hadn’t been—as Romilly put it—a “gentler” black hole, they would never have had a chance.

As Romilly had said—and as his twenty-odd years of notes had meticulously measured and elucidated—Gargantua rotated, which meant that it dragged space-time along for the ride. A slingshot was entirely plausible, but a bit more… complicated than zipping near a planet.

Cooper checked everything for the umpteenth time, hoping Romilly hadn’t gone more than a little looney while he was alone. Because Gargantua wasn’t going to grant him the slightest clemency for even the tiniest mistake.

* * *

Back in the
Endurance
, Amelia watched the lander come loose and shift orientation as Cooper and Tars prepared the maneuver.

Cooper’s voice came over the radio.

“Once we’ve gathered enough speed around Gargantua, we use Lander One and Ranger Two as rocket boosters to push us out of the black hole’s gravity,”
he explained, as the lander reattached in the rear of the ring module, blocking her view of the Ranger and Cooper.

“The linkages between landers are destroyed,”
Cooper said.
“So we’ll control manually. When Lander One’s fuel is spent, Tars will detach—”

“—and get sucked into the black hole,”
Tars finished.

Amelia thought they were joking at first. They did a lot of that, Tars and Cooper. Sometimes she wanted to change the humor settings on
both
of them. But it crept over her that this time there wasn’t any humor involved.

“Why does he have to detach?” she asked.

“We have to shed mass if we’re gonna escape that gravity,”
Cooper explained.

“Newton’s third law,”
Tars put in.
“The only way humans have ever figured out of getting somewhere is to leave something behind.”

Doyle
, Amelia thought,
Romilly, Mann, her father—and now Tars?
How much loss could she take?

“Cooper,” she said, feeling a little desperate, and even a little indignant. “You can’t ask Tars to do this for us—”

“He’s a robot, Amelia,”
Cooper shot back.
“I don’t have to ask him to do anything.”

“Cooper,” she snapped. “You asshole!”

“Sorry,”
Cooper said.
“You broke up a little over there.”

She was ready to launch into a full-blown tirade, but Tars interceded.

“It’s what we intended, Dr. Brand,”
Tars said.
“It’s our last chance to save people on Earth. If we can find some way to transmit the quantum data I’ll find in there, they might still make it.”
The robot’s calm, reasonable tone checked her anger.

“If there’s someone still there to receive it,” she allowed, feeling emptier than ever.

Was it possible? Did it even make sense? It was hard to know anymore. But it was a better chance than nothing, and Cooper was probably right about shedding mass. Maddeningly, he was seldom wrong about such things.

But if there was a way to prove her father wrong, to redeem plan A, they had to take it. It just seemed so wrong that Tars had to be the one to make the sacrifice. It should be her, but it was too late for that—Cooper had seen to it, she realized. And—to be fair—neither the robots nor Cooper knew enough about the population bomb. If glitches developed, if improvisation was required, she had to be there. Seen logically, it should be Tars who did this, and not her.

But it was still hard to watch from safety as someone else paid her bills.

* * *

As the engines pushed them forward, ever faster, the ship began to shudder.

Amelia tightened her harness and tried not to revisit what would happen if Cooper was even slightly wrong in his calculations. They were so close now that all she could see was a massive Stygian ocean wreathed in golden, glowing gas. It seemed impossible they were going to escape as they fell, faster and faster, that this ancient dead god would let them slip his greedy, immortal grasp. Nothing as frail and mortal as the
Endurance
stood a chance in the face of such cosmic hunger. Even if they made it past perigee—their nearest approach to the black hole—they would surely break up on the way out.

But she had to believe—had to believe that Cooper could pull it off.

* * *

And, so suddenly, they were there, at the bottom of their fall. At least she
hoped
it was the bottom.

“Maximum velocity achieved,”
Case announced.
“Prepare to fire escape thrusters.”

“Ready,”
Tars said.

“Ready,”
Cooper echoed.

Amelia couldn’t tear her eyes from the impossible horizon, the black-hearted monster that lay below them.

“Main engine ignition in three, two, one, mark,”
Case intoned.

The hull thrummed as the main engines fired, adding to the inertia already whipping them around Gargantua, turning the black hole’s gravity against it in a demonstration of stellar jujitsu. But the giant wasn’t giving up without a fight.
Endurance
strained to its limits for freedom, like a four-wheel drive trying to climb out of a sandy hole with the wheels spinning and the slope sliding backward.

Inertia wasn’t enough. Nor were the main engines.

More thrust was needed.

“Lander One,”
Case continued,
“engines on my mark… three, two, one
, mark
—”

“Fire,”
Tars said, and the lander’s engines engaged. The
Endurance
protested even more, her metal skeleton audibly straining as the small craft emptied it fuel reserves in one massive, maximum burn.

“Ranger Two, engines on my mark,”
Case said.
“Three, two, one
, mark
.”

“Fire,”
she heard Cooper say.

Amelia saw the stars again as they pulled away from Gargantua, toward the grand spectacle of the night sky, so much brighter than that of the solar system. And somewhere out there—outshone by nebulae and pulsars and blaze of the stellar newborn—there was the faint red dot for which they were aiming.

Edmunds’ planet.

Unbelievably, the powered slingshot seemed to be working. The tipping point was still ahead, but they were approaching it.

“That little maneuver cost us fifty-one years,”
Cooper reported.

“You don’t sound bad for a hundred and twenty,” Amelia responded, a little giddy with reaction.

“Lander One, prepare to detach on my mark,”
Case said.
“Three…”

She could see the lander, Tars at the controls, and her brief cheerfulness vanished as quickly as it had come. The lander’s fuel was spent, and now it was just dead weight. As was Tars.

Space required a certain parsimony of thought. Something was either useful, or it was dead weight, and if it was dead weight you dropped it. They had been shedding weight since the first stage booster detached while they were still in Earth’s atmosphere. Like Tars said, you had to leave something behind.

Was that how her father had felt about Earth, and the rest of the human race? Were they dead weight that had to be dropped, so that a handful could move on?

But Tars wasn’t dead weight.

Tars was Tars. He had a humor setting…

“Two one
, mark
,”
Case said.

Through the cockpit window, she saw Tars moving.

“Detach,”
he said.

And the lander dropped away.

“Goodbye, Tars,” she said.

“See you on the other side, Coop,”
Tars said optimistically.

Amelia frowned. What was that supposed to mean? Something about the way had Tars said it…