Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization (19 page)

The scientist was trying to kill him.

Cooper fired his own thrusters to avoid the attack, which sent him plummeting back over the cliff.

Fortunately it wasn’t a sheer drop, but a series of descending shelves, so he landed on the next one down.

* * *

Murph watched in horror as Tom placed himself squarely in front of Getty. Her brother’s face was growing redder by the moment.

“They can’t stay here, Tom,” Murph said.

“Not one more day—” Getty began to add, until Tom’s fist punctuated his sentence.

Getty dropped like a sack.

“Tom!” Lois gasped.

Tom turned his angry gaze on Murph.

“Coop,” he said, “get your aunt’s things—she’s done here.”

“Tom,” she pleaded. “Dad didn’t raise you this dumb—”

Then Tom exploded.

“Dad didn’t raise us!” he bellowed. “Grandpa did, and he’s buried outside with Mom, in the ground. I’m
not
leaving them.”

“You have to, Tom,” she said.

“I’m a farmer, Murph,” he replied. “You don’t give up on the earth.”

“No,” she shouted back, “but she gave up on you! And she’s poisoning your family!”

* * *

By the time Cooper pushed himself up to his knees, Mann was almost on top of him.

“I’m sorry,” Mann said. “I can’t let you leave.”

“Why?” Cooper asked, desperately.

“We’re going to need your ship to continue the mission,” Mann said, “once the others realize what this place
isn’t
.”

And it clicked—all of his uneasiness about this place, Mann’s strange remarks, the too-perfect news about a surface no one had seen.

“You faked all that data?” Cooper asked, incredulous.

“I had a lot of time,” Mann said.

“Is there even a surface?” Cooper asked.

“I’m afraid not.”

Cooper saw the kick coming, but there was nothing he could do about it. It knocked him back and down, but he managed to cling to the edge of the ice shelf.

“I tried to do my duty, Cooper,” Mann said, “but the day I arrived I could see this place had nothing. I resisted the temptation for years—but I knew there was a way to get rescued.”

“You
coward
,” Cooper snarled. He jerked up his elbow and fired the thruster at Mann. Unprepared, the scientist went sprawling as Cooper scrambled back up onto the shelf. He managed to find his footing before Mann came back, tackling him, and they both went to the ice, clutching and grasping at each other, wrestling on the edge of the abyss.

* * *

“Please come with us,” Murph begged her brother as Getty slowly got to his feet, blood trickling from his nose. She had never seen Tom so angry, so irrational. Somehow, she had to calm him down, make him listen to reason.

“To live underground, praying Dad comes back to save us all?” Tom sneered.

“He’s not coming back,” Murph said. “He was never coming back. It’s up to us. To me.”

That was a mistake—she saw it right away.

She wondered, suddenly, if he’d resented her being taken off, educated, treated differently. Being part of their father’s world. Fragments of memory came to her. He’d made comments, now and then—his usual sarcastic remarks—but nothing that had added up to this.

“You’re gonna save the human race, Murph?” Tom rejoined. “Really? How? Our dad couldn’t—”

“He didn’t even try!” she shouted. Then, quieter. “He just abandoned us, Tom.” But she could see Tom’s intractability in the set of his mouth.

Coop handed her the box of her things. He looked so young and earnest, confused.

And sick.

“Tom,” she implored him. “If you won’t come, let them—”

Tom pointed at the box.

“Take your stuff and go,” he said.

She studied it for a moment, the container of things from another life. Then she handed it back to Coop.

“Keep it,” she said. Then she left. Getty came with her, silently nursing his jaw.

* * *

Mann lunged at him like a madman, but this time Cooper managed to sidestep and grapple him, throwing him to the ground and pinning him there.

“Stop this!” Cooper shouted, his face mere inches from the scientist’s. Mann’s response was to slam his faceplate into Cooper’s, hard, snapping his head back.

Then again.

And again.

“Someone’s—glass—will—give—way—first!” he grunted between strikes.

“Fifty-fifty you kill yourself,” Cooper howled. “Stop!”

And suddenly Mann did stop. He looked at Cooper with an unreadable expression. His faceplate was already riddled with tiny fractures.

So was Cooper’s.

“Best odds I’ve had in years,” Mann told him, and then he butted his head into Cooper’s glass. Cooper heard it crack, felt the cold first, and then the acrid, nose-scorching scent of ammonia.

Horrified, he rolled away, trying to cover the crack with his glove, only then realizing how big it was.

As he lay there, he was vaguely aware that Mann was bending over him. He felt the burn in his throat now, and his windpipe tried to close, to keep the poisonous atmosphere out of his lungs.

“Please don’t judge me, Cooper,” Mann said. “You were never tested like I was. Few men have been…”

* * *

Murph’s throat was tight as she drove away from the farmhouse and back toward NASA.

“You did your best, Murph,” Getty said. He sounded as if he meant it, and she was amazed he could summon that much empathy while nursing his own bleeding nose.

But it wasn’t how she felt. She
hadn’t
done her best. She’d been glad to be quit of the farm and corn and all of it—as glad as Dad had ever been—to just leave Grandpa and Tom to deal with it. And the result was a chasm between her and her brother, a chasm miles wide and deep and completely invisible to her, until now. Tom was the guy who stayed and did what everyone told him he was supposed to do, working hard at the soil, watching his crops die, watching his children die.

She had followed their absentee father off to save the world in an air-conditioned cave. She had abandoned Tom, too.

Small wonder if he resented her.

But it was Lois and little Coop that would pay the price for what she had done. It was a price they should not have been forced to pay.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Cooper crawled, half blind, across the ice. His face was numb, but his lungs felt like they were on fire. He knew if it wasn’t for the positive pressure from his oxygen supply, he would probably already be unconscious. As it was, the toxic air of Mann’s world was at least slightly diluted.

That wouldn’t help him for long, though. The first black wave of panic was over, replaced by…

“You’re feeling it, aren’t you?” Mann said. “That survival instinct—that’s what drove me. It’s always driven the human race, and it’s going to save it now.
I’m
going to save it. For all mankind. For you, Cooper.”

Mann got up and began walking away.

“I’m sorry,” he said over his shoulder. “I can’t watch you go through this—I thought I could. But I’m still here. I’m here for you.”

“I’m here for you.”
It was the most terrifying thing Mann had said.
He’s really doing this
, Cooper thought
. Mann is really going to let me die. And he thinks he’s being
nice
about it.

“Cooper,” Mann continued, “when you left, did Professor Brand read you the poem? How does it end?”

Cooper saw him climb back up onto the shelf, and knew he would never have the strength to do the same thing. Even if he did…

“Do not go gentle into that good night,” Mann said.

Cooper remembered of course—the professor’s comforting voice, wishing them farewell as they slipped the shackles of Earth and headed out toward Saturn, the wormhole, the stars beyond. His words had been a guide, a path to follow, a message of hope.

On Mann’s lips they were a eulogy.

More bullshit to make him feel clean about murder.

People had always called Cooper stubborn, but he had always thought of himself more as realistic, and perhaps a bit—persistent. Just now he felt something harden in him and compress, like coal being squeezed into a diamond.

He knew, intellectually, that he was going to die someday. He wasn’t exactly okay with it, but facts were facts. One day, he would, in fact, go into that “good night.” But not today, quietly or any other way. And not by Mann’s hands.

No way.

Wasn’t going to happen.

His mind boiled away everything but what he needed to know, what he needed to see—and then he saw it, just a few feet away.

The long-range transmitter.

Summoning everything he had, he began crawling toward it, even as black spots began to dance before his eyes and his chest felt as if it were going to explode.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

* * *

Mann looked back down at Cooper, his tortured coughing and choking as clear in his ears as if he were right there. He had wondered if he would feel regret. He supposed it was still too early to tell. Cooper was still trying, still struggling, still somehow hoping to survive. It was the most magnificent thing he had ever witnessed. He wished the pilot could somehow understand why it was necessary.

He turned away and used his jets to return to the higher ground, and then looked back once more at the feebly thrashing figure.

“Cooper,” he said. “Do you see your children yet?”

The only answer was more hacking, and it was all suddenly too much for Mann. It must be so lonely to die, even when someone was with you.

A wave of unanticipated terror swept through him, and he turned off the radio, unable to even listen anymore. Cooper was still moving, a small figure, but at least now he was silent.

Mann put his back to it, and went to do what he must.

* * *

Cooper grasped the transmitter, but his gloves might as well have been mittens as he struggled to reconnect it. He tried to slow down, to get it right, but everything was fading, and if he didn’t do it soon, it wouldn’t get done at all.

But he couldn’t do it. Not with the gloves on.

So he pulled them off. He felt the cold again—it struck through his hands and up his arms, encircling his heart, but he could
feel
; for a few seconds the sensation was energizing. But then everything was shaking, and his fingers wouldn’t stay still…

Then the transmitter clicked into place.

“Brand!” he rasped out. “Brand! Help me! Help…”

* * *

And elsewhere, on a dusty plain, Murph knew what she had to do. She wheeled the truck around and floored it.

* * *

Brand leapt into the cockpit, Cooper’s fading voice still ringing in her ears. What had happened? Cooper sounded like he was asphyxiating, and she hadn’t heard anything at all from Mann. Was the scientist dead already?

“I have a fix,” Case said, as the engines cut in.

“Cooper?” she said. “Cooper, we’re coming.”

“No air,” he wheezed. “Ammonia.”

“Don’t talk,” she said. Breathe as little as possible—we’re coming.”

* * *

Murph pulled off the road and blew into one of Tom’s cornfields, cutting through it as Getty sat wide-eyed and white-knuckled in the passenger seat. As she watched the corn part around the bumper, she remembered that long-ago day when they had chased the Indian drone, the three of them—Dad, Tom, and her.

The last time they had done anything together. Tom driving, her keeping the antenna fixed, Dad cracking the encryption. They’d been a team, a family.

Only a day later, all of that had been blown to hell. And now, Tom thought she was the enemy.

Well—she was about to be.

* * *

Brand tried to keep steady as Case wove somewhat more than recklessly through the ice formations, avoiding collision sometimes by no more than inches.

It was the same sick feeling in her belly as the one she’d felt when she saw the wave bearing down on them on Miller’s world—the realization that not only was everything they knew not enough, but sometimes it actively hurt them. All of her instincts had told her that a few inches of water was harmless, and that big fluffy clouds were nothing to worry about.

Every assumption they made here was a disaster in the making.

She didn’t know how Mann’s world had deceived them this time, but she hoped desperately that Case knew what he was doing, where he was going, because Cooper couldn’t have much time left.

* * *

In Mann’s pod, Romilly was still trying to comprehend what he was seeing, and not really getting anywhere. He felt a renewed sense of the frustration he’d felt on the
Endurance
; years alone with the data, talking to himself, on the verge of going crazy—and occasionally maybe veering over that verge.

He remembered what Mann had said about leaving Kipp’s archives intact, the tacit implication being that he didn’t need to bother with them at all. But this… this was intolerable. Why would Mann warn him off, anyway? Had he stored personal data? Had Kipp witnessed and recorded him acting a little crazy? Romilly could understand that. He’d been there himself. But the fact was, there were some fundamental contradictions here that only a scan of the archives could clear up.

Mann would probably never know, and if he did—well, it was far easier to get forgiveness than permission.

“This data makes no sense,” he said to Tars. “Access the archive.”

* * *

This is good enough
, Murph figured.

She hopped out of the truck, lifted the gas can from the back, and started dousing the cornstalks. She remembered wandering in the fields when she was little, being thoroughly enveloped by them, like being in her own secret maze. She had liked corn, then—the grassy smell of the leaves, the yellow pollen when it tasseled, the ears that appeared almost magically beneath those tufts, swelling daily. The sweet taste of it when it was green, in the milk, before it began to harden into grain.

That had been a real luxury, green corn—a waste of the corn’s full potential to feed humanity’s masses, but an awesome treat for a kid. To her, it would always be the taste of summer, and of her youth. The idea of burning the corn seemed wrong to the point of being sacrilegious.