Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization (12 page)

“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.

“Can get you killed, same as recklessness,” Cooper opined.

“Cooper!” Doyle chimed in. “Too damned fast!”

“I got this,” Cooper said, as the ship threatened to shake apart around them. His knuckles on the controls were white as he tried to keep them from vibrating out of his hands.

“Should I disable feedback?” Case asked.

“No!” Cooper exploded. “No, I need to feel the air…”

The lander was white-hot now, cutting through a layer of clouds as thin as razors.

“Do we have a fix on the beacon?” he asked.

“Got it!” Case said. “Can you maneuver?”

Yeah
, he thought.
We have our choice of crash sites, as long as most of them are more-or-less straight down.

“Gotta shave more speed,” he said instead. “I’ll try and spiral down to it.”

A moment later they burst through the clouds. The surface looked far too close to Cooper, but at least they seemed to be over a level surface…

“Just water,” Doyle said.

Cooper realized he was right. They were over an ocean.

“The stuff of life…” Brand said.

“Twelve hundred meters out,” Case advised.

Cooper banked as hard as he could, trying to shed more speed. The surface was coming fast.

“It’s shallow,” Brand said. “Feet deep…”

Now they were low enough they were kicking up a splash, like an overgrown speedboat.

“Seven hundred meters,” Case intoned.

Cooper watched the water sheeting toward him.

“Wait for it…” he said.

“Five hundred meters.”

Cooper yanked the stick back.

“Fire!” he said.

The retro-rockets kicked in just above the surface, punching back against their velocity. He tried to hold it, but the craft slewed sideways as the landing gear came down. They dropped, hit the water, casting up a spray. The impact nearly jarred Cooper’s teeth loose, but he held on stubbornly. Then when the air cleared, they were down, and everything looked good. Brand had been right—the water was really, really shallow—so much so that the landing gear held the Ranger just above the surface.

“Very graceful,” Brand managed. Cooper noticed she and Doyle were staring at him. Both of them looked a little roughed up.

“No,” he said. “But it was very
efficient.
”

They still just stared, but he pretty much ignored it, wondering how much time had already passed on Earth.

Days?

Months?

Better not to think about it
, he decided.

“What’re you waiting for?” he barked. “Go!”

They snapped out of it then, unfastening their harnesses, checking their helmets. Case detached himself from the floor and went to the hatch. It cracked open, and light and spray blew into the cabin.

It caught Cooper, then, in his gut—they were on another world.

EIGHTEEN

Amelia followed Doyle and Case into the shallow sea. Cooper remained aboard the Ranger.

She experimented with sloshing through it as Case took a moment to orient himself. The water felt thicker, heavier than it should. More viscous. It might have been the bulk of her spacesuit, but she didn’t think so. They had practiced with those underwater, back on Earth, in preparation for the mission.

Here, though, it was different.

“This way,” Case directed. “About two hundred meters.”

Amelia looked in the direction the robot indicated. The water stretched out to the horizon, where it met a mountain range, misty with distance; one long ridge that vanished in each direction. The sight of the alien skyline arrested her for a moment, and she wished they weren’t in such a hurry. She had long dreamt of her first moments on an extra-solar planet, and this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. There should be a little ceremony, a little “That’s one small step.”

Instead they were in this tearing hurry, and it felt completely half-assed. But it was what it was. They weren’t here to set up flags and take pictures.

So she pushed forward.

Spacesuits, she decided after a few feet, were not well designed for wading. They were heavy, clumsy, and didn’t give one much of a feel for the surface on which one was walking. And that wasn’t the only thing making it difficult to make any progress.

“The gravity’s punishing,” Doyle panted.

“Floating around in space too long?” Amelia teased.

“One hundred and thirty percent Earth gravity,” Case informed them.

Right
, Amelia thought. That explained a lot. This much more gravity wasn’t ideal, but it was something people couldn adapt to. Water was a good sign, and with any luck, there would be at least some habitable land at the foot of the mountains…

They pushed on, with Case still in the lead and Doyle falling behind.

* * *

After what seemed like an eternity, Case stopped.

“Should be here,” he said, and with that he began moving in a search pattern. Amelia moved to join him.

“The signal’s coming from here,” she said, but as soon as she spoke, it didn’t make any sense. The beacon should be with the ship, yet the ship clearly wasn’t here. Even if Miller had crashed, the water here wasn’t deep enough to hide the wreck.

Where had it gone?

Suddenly Case dropped down and began thrashing under the water. He looked for all the world like a film Amelia had once seen, of a bear fishing in a river. That is, if a bear were rectangular, and had metal instead of fur on its exterior.