Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization (9 page)

Then the light was changing, growing brighter, the sky getting closer as a huge invisible hand pressed down on him, harder and harder.

Gagarin
, he thought,
Shepard, Grissom, Titov, Glenn, Carpenter, Nikolayev…

The bright day was already fading as the horizon appeared in his vision. There was a sudden, gut-wrenching lurch, as the hand pressing him down came off for an instant, and his body pulled forward.

Then the G-force slammed him back into his crash couch.

“Stage one, separation,”
he heard control say. He tried to imagine the huge booster dropping away, but it was hard to think of anything but the force pinning him down, the barely controlled bomb that lay behind him, hurling him toward the stars.

White, Chaffee, Komarov…

The horizon began to curve in earnest. The ship was no longer shuddering, although it was still humming with acceleration. He couldn’t move. He felt as if he weighed a thousand pounds, as if the next time he exhaled he would not be able to inhale again, and he would suffocate in his crash couch.

Then he felt suddenly as if he was falling—almost like he had been hurled from a plane—and then he weighed nothing at all.

“Stage two, separation,”
control said.

Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin…

Skip ahead
, he thought.

Cooper.

Because finally, incredibly—he was in space.

As soon as he could move again, he glanced around the cramped cabin at his companions to see how they were handling things. Dr. Brand, Doyle, and Romilly looked like he probably did—a little dazed.

“All here, Mr. Cooper,” the fifth member of the crew assured him. Tars, the robot who had zapped him at the fence. “Plenty of slaves for my robot colony.”

Cooper wondered if his ears—or worse, his brain—had been affected by lift-off. His confusion must have been written across his face, because Doyle stepped in.

“They gave him a humor setting,” he explained. “So he’d fit in with his unit better. He thinks it relaxes us.”

“A massive sarcastic robot,” Cooper remarked. “What a good idea.”

“I have a cue light I can turn on when I’m joking, if you like,” Tars offered.

“Probably help,” Cooper said.

“You can use it to find your way back to the ship after I blow you out of the airlock,” Tars said.

Tars “looked” at him, and Cooper looked back. He didn’t see anything that appeared to be a cue light.

The hairs on the back of his neck were beginning to prick up when an LED suddenly flashed on.

Frowning, Cooper shook his head.

“What’s your humor setting, Tars?” he asked.

“One hundred percent,” the machine replied.

Wonderful.
How many months was it going to be?

“Take it down to seventy-five, please,” he said, then he turned away, glanced around to assure himself that everyone was still strapped in, and started checking the instruments.

* * *

The conjoined Rangers settled into a low orbit, and for a time there was nothing to do but wait.

Nothing wrong with that
, he mused. The Ranger had a wide field of vision, giving them all a panoramic view of Earth as it turned below them. Even though he was still strapped into his crash couch, Cooper found himself rubbernecking like a tourist, watching the continents, seas, and clouds—thinking that it all seemed somehow a little unreal. The lift-off, the terrible acceleration, appeared as if long ago and now, as they spent their time in free-fall, everything felt a dream.

The planet—
his
planet—was as beautiful as it was fragile, and it was the only home humanity had ever known. Viewing it from out here, he found it hard to believe that she didn’t want them anymore.

He noticed that Dr. Brand was also watching the world turn below them, her expression distant.

“We’ll be back,” he told her.

She didn’t show any sign that she’d heard him, didn’t turn away from the view, but continued to stare.

“It’s hard,” he went on. “Leaving everything. My kids, your father…”

“We’re going to be spending a lot of time together,” Brand said, turning her gaze toward him.

Cooper nodded. “We should learn to talk,” he said.

“And when not to,” she replied, looking away again. “Just trying to be honest,” she added.

“Maybe you don’t need to be
that
honest,” he said, wincing internally. He looked over at Tars. “Tars, what’s your honesty parameter?”

Tars didn’t need a crash couch. He fit into a niche in the center of the control panel, between the manual units.

As Cooper spoke, he unlatched himself and moved toward the rear airlock.

“Ninety percent,” he responded.

“Ninety?” Cooper said. “What kind of robot are you?”

“Absolute honesty isn’t always the most diplomatic—or safe—form of communication with emotional beings,” Tars informed him.

True that
, Cooper thought wryly. He turned back to Brand, and shrugged.

“Ninety percent honesty it is, then,” he said.

At first he thought he had bombed again, but then her lips traced a smile on her face. Almost imperceptible, but he was sure it was there.

Progress.

“Sixty seconds out…”
The radio crackled.

Cooper decided he’d better quit while he was ahead. Besides, he was about to earn his pay. The first installment, anyway.

So he looked away from the Earth and Brand, and focused his attention on the
Endurance
, as they approached her. His first impression was of a wedding ring, glittering in the twin lights of the Earth and the sun.

The Rangers were sleek, winged, aerodynamic craft built for landing and taking off from planets that possessed atmospheres. Not so the
Endurance
—there was nothing aerodynamic about her, and any landing she made on any planet with an atmosphere would be pretty much the same sort of landing as a meteor would make: fast, fiery, and catastrophic.

Yet floating in space—where she had been built—the vessel was a thing of beauty.

She was, indeed, a ring—but only in the most basic sense, and as they drew nearer his original impression faded. He could distinguish that she was formed from a number of boxy, trapezoidal, prism-shaped modules jointed together by curved connectors. The “ring” wasn’t empty either. Access tubes led from the inner surface of the circular body to a central axis where the docking locks lay. Two ships—the landers—were already there. All she needed were the two Rangers. Feeling oddly calm, Cooper maneuvered his Ranger in, matching his velocity to that of the starship.

He’d run through the docking sequence plenty in simulations, but in the back of his mind he’d worried that the real thing would throw him some sort of curve. But he got her lined up with ease, which felt good.

“It’s all you, Doyle,” he said.

Doyle drifted toward the hatch and began the final sequence, which was sort of the tricky part. If he messed this up they would at best lose precious oxygen and at worst—well, he wasn’t sure, but it could be bad. He watched as Doyle lined up a circular array of small grapples and engaged them to bring the two ships together in an airtight seal. Each mechanical claw latched perfectly, as if Doyle had been doing this his whole life.

With that, the
Endurance
was complete.

* * *

Once Amelia Brand’s primate brain stopped screaming that she was falling and needed to grab on to something, zero gravity turned out to be great fun. The slightest push sent her flying around effortlessly in a way she had never imagined—not even in her dreams.

It was almost too bad it had to end.

* * *

As they boarded the
Endurance
, it became clear that it wasn’t as roomy as it looked from the outside. Part of this was because two-thirds of each of the modules was taken up by storage. The floors, the walls—almost every surface was composed of hatches of various sizes. On a deep-space vessel, there could be no wasted space—not even one the size of a matchbox.

Flipping switches and adjusting settings, Amelia, Doyle, and Romilly began powering up what would be their home for—well, who knew how long? She watched Tars activate Case, an articulated machine like himself, who made up the final member of their crew.

Doyle moved “up” to the cockpit and turned on the command console. Technically, there was no up or down at this point, but soon it would no longer be a technicality, as evinced by the ladder that led from the lower deck up to the command deck.

She watched as Doyle finished linking the on-board systems to the Ranger.

“Cooper, you should have control,” Doyle said.

“Talking fine,” Cooper replied. “Ready to spin?”

Doyle and Romilly strapped in. Amelia followed their lead and took a chair.

“All set,” she replied.

She felt nothing at first, but then the ship began to shake as Cooper fired the Ranger’s thrusters, angled perfectly to set the great wheel turning. As the spin picked up, weight began to return to Amelia’s body, pulling her feet toward the outer rim of the starship. It wasn’t gravity, exactly, but the manifestation of inertia often referred to as centrifugal force. Without it—without some semblance of weight
—
bad things happened to the human body over time, like bone loss and heart disease.

We’re going to need our bones and our hearts when we reach our destination
, she thought.

Unfortunately, spin wasn’t a perfect substitute for gravity, because the inner ear wasn’t entirely fooled by it. It knew they were whirling around due to a little thing called the Coriolis effect.

On Earth the Coriolis effect was a big deal. It drove the climate, creating huge cells of air moving in circles—clockwise in the northern hemisphere, counter-clockwise in the southern. But the Earth was so huge, the human body didn’t notice the spin on a personal level. Yet on a whirling carnival ride it was easy to feel, often with upsetting results.

The
Endurance
lay somewhere in between those extremes, though leaning toward the carnival ride. Amelia felt it herself, especially when she moved toward the axis, but it didn’t really bother her.

Romilly, on the other hand, already was looking a little green.

“You okay, there?” she asked him.

“Yup.” He practically gurgled as he replied. “Just need a little time—”

“There should be a Dramamine in the hab pod,” she told him. He nodded gratefully, and moved gingerly in that direction.

FOURTEEN

“I miss you already, Amelia,”
Professor Brand told his daughter, via the video link.
“Be safe. Give my regards to Dr. Mann.”

“I will, Dad,” Amelia said.

“Things look good for your trajectory,”
the professor continued. “We’re calculating two years to Saturn.”

“That’s a lot of Dramamine…” Romilly said. He didn’t seem to be getting along with the artificial gravity, yet Cooper hadn’t felt even a twinge of unpleasantness.

Two years, though
, he thought. Murph would be twelve, and Tom seventeen. And then another two years back to Earth, so really fourteen and nineteen. Minimum. That was what he was going to miss,
if
their mission in the wormhole took zero time.

Which it would not.

Still, maybe it wouldn’t take all
that
long. In theory the trip through the wormhole would take a fraction of the time, relatively speaking. Maybe the closest planet would be the one to pan out. He might yet be home while Murph was still in her teens.

“Keep an eye on my family, sir,” Cooper told Professor Brand. “’Specially Murph. She’s a smart one.”

“We’ll be waiting when you get back,”
the scientist promised.
“A little older, a little wiser, but happy to see you.”

* * *

Cooper prepped the engines as Doyle ran a last series of diagnostics from the cockpit cabin of the
Endurance
. It was a little roomier than the one in the Ranger, set above the central cabin and reached by the rungs of a short ladder.

Brand and Romilly strapped in, and Tars and Case likewise secured themselves with metallic
clanks.

Cooper gazed down at the Earth once more, Professor Brand’s last words still fresh in his mind.

“Do not go gentle into that good night…”

He checked with Doyle, who nodded an okay. Then, without any ceremony, he fired the thrusters, and the
Endurance
began its journey out of Earth’s orbit, and toward the stars.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Godspeed
, Endurance
.”

* * *

“So alone,” Cooper said, staring at the diminishing sphere of the Earth. They had all changed into their blue sleep outfits, and had begun setting up the cryo-beds—which looked way too much like fancy coffins for his taste. Brand came to stand next to him.

“We’ve got each other,” she told him. “Dr. Mann had it worse.”

“I meant them,” he said, pointing at Earth. “Look at that perfect planet. We’re not gonna find another one like her.”

“No,” Brand agreed. “This isn’t like looking for a new condo—the human race is going to be adrift, desperate for a rock to cling to while they catch their breaths. We have to find that rock. Our three prospects are at the edge of what might sustain human life.”

She held up her tablet and tapped a blurry image of a dark blue planet. The color made it feel promising almost immediately. Blue was what Earth looked like from way out. Blue could mean water. Of course, Neptune was also blue, and it had an atmosphere of hydrogen, helium, and trace methane—completely inimical to life as they knew it.

“Laura Miller’s first,” Brand said. “She started our biology program.”

The image switched to an even smaller image, faintly red. It reminded him of early photographs of Mars.

“And Wolf Edmunds is here,” she said. And the way she said it, the way his name came off her tongue—Cooper had never heard anything like that in her voice before. As if that red dot was the center of the universe. Suddenly he was curious.