Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization (20 page)

She was still thinking that when she set it aflame.

* * *

Cooper rolled ungracefully onto his back, his eyes fixed skyward, but not seeing anything there.

Do you see your children yet?

He did. He saw Tom, grinning, driving the truck for the first time—and younger, laughing as Donald swung him around in a circle out in front of the house, when there had still been a few scraps of lawn. Before the dust took over. Tom, holding the swaddled figure of Jesse, the grandchild he would never know—
could
never know, because the boy was years dead before Cooper had even known he existed.

And he saw Murph, a tiny, wrinkled thing in her mother’s arms, a single curl of red hair on her otherwise bald pate. Murph, in the truck, pretending it was an Apollo lander, that the stick was the attitude or thrust controller, depending on what it needed to be at any point in her pretend flight.

Murph later, shifting the gears so he could drink his coffee.

And Murph in her bedroom, looking at the watch he had given her. He saw her throw it away, saw her tear-stained face.

Murph
, he thought, as everything blurred.
I’m sorry.

* * *

Murph gazed at the fire leaping through the corn, stalk to stalk, a living creature, gleeful in its life, as hungry as any new-born thing. Her disgust at what she had done was fading fast—it was the corn that was keeping Tom here, killing little Coop. If burning the corn—if giving the fire life—meant a new life for Coop and Lois, then it was well worth it. Tom would see the smoke. He would come. She didn’t want to be here then.

She climbed back into the truck and headed out.

He would figure out who did it, soon enough. By then she would be long gone, and Lois and Coop along with her.

* * *

Brand watched as the cloudscape jetted by, as below them a huge plain opened up uninterrupted and white—except for what appeared to a be a tiny, broken doll lying near the edge of it, next to a deep blue hole.

“I see him,” she told Case.

* * *

Cooper felt rather a hard thud on the ice, and at first thought it was nothing—just the last, random sensation of his dying body. But then he forced his eyes open and, through the wind-whipped ice and his own frozen tears, he saw it. The lander, and someone leaping out of it, elbow-thrusters firing.

Mann’s come back to finish me off
, he thought, trying to summon the energy to crawl again. It was no use—his arms and legs might as well have been made of lead.

Then a moment later someone yanked his useless helmet off and he saw Brand’s face through her own glass visor. She shoved something over his nose, and he was suddenly sucking in air—sweet, stale, canned air. That was all he wanted to do, breathe. She had to know.

* * *

Tars didn’t seem to be having any luck with Kipp. He turned to Romilly.

“It needs a person to unlock its archival function,” the robot informed him. He shifted a bit so Romilly could reach the data screen and start the procedure. Then he heard a voice—tiny, far off, shouting at him. He looked over and realized it was his helmet.

As he reached for it, Kipp stirred to life.

Romilly lifted the helmet, and the voice grew clearer. Identifiable.

“Brand?” he said. He was struck by how urgent she sounded.

But Romilly never heard the rest.

TWENTY-NINE

Mann struggled across the ice, trying to get his story straight in his mind. He would have to lose his own long-range transmitter, claim Cooper had accidently disengaged it in the fall when Mann had tried to save him.

Should’ve dropped it down the hole
, he realized, but he wasn’t going back there now.

He felt the shudder in the ice first, and then the sound and shock blew through him, frozen particles streaking past on the front of the concussion. At first he thought there had been some random shifting in the frozen masses and the ice had broken, but then he saw the black smoke churning from a nearby hilltop.

His
hilltop. Where he’d lain so long in exile.

Where Kipp was.

He felt a fresh surge of terror. This was all spinning out of control.

“Dammit, Romilly,” he muttered. He’d warned him, hadn’t he? It wasn’t his fault.

He switched his radio back on. Brand’s voice greeted him.

“Come on, Cooper,” she was saying. “Just a couple more steps…”

Well that tears it
, he thought. He had known he would have to deal with Cooper, but he’d hoped to have the others as companions in the mission.
Desperately
hoped. He didn’t want to be alone again. That was what had broken him, the solitude. If there was any thought that was intolerable, it was to be alone again.

But now he had no choice. There could be no mending this with Cooper. Romilly was certainly dead, and they would blame that on him, too.

Brand…

Still, he could hold onto the fact that this time it wouldn’t be forever. There was still Edmunds’ world, and plan B. He wouldn’t be alone for the rest of his life. Wolf might still be alive, and there was no need for him to know anything about this… unpleasantness. And whether he survived or not, there would be the children. He could take the isolation again, as long as he knew there would be an end to it.

And maybe—once he had some leverage over her—he might be able to salvage Brand. Somehow. No one had a greater stake in this mission than she did. So that it might succeed, she might be made to see the realities.

Before he could appeal to her sense of reason, however, her sense of mission, he had to have the upper hand. Had to hold all of the cards.

He hurried toward the Ranger.

* * *

“Brand, I’m sorry,” Cooper wheezed, as soon as the respirator was off of his face. “Mann lied—”

As he spoke, a look of comprehension swept across her face.

“Oh, no,” she gasped.

* * *

As Murph roared up to the house, Tom’s truck was nowhere to be seen.

That was as planned—he would be fighting the fire she had set, trying to salvage the crop.

“Keep watch,” she told Getty as she jerked the door open. Then she took off running toward the front door.

“Lois!” she called out as she hit the porch.

* * *

“There’s been an explosion,” Case informed them, as the lander rose and pivoted amid clouds of steam and frost.

“Where?” Brand asked.

“Dr. Mann’s compound,” he replied, as they leapt skyward.

Romilly
, Cooper thought.
Tars
. Tars was with him.

What had Mann done to them?

* * *

Mann strapped into the Ranger, gave the systems a quick once-over, and then started the engines. As the ship shot into the air, he felt a sudden, unexpected exhilaration.

This planet had been his prison, and for most of the time he had believed it would be his tomb. It had made him do things he never thought himself capable of doing, and only now did he allow himself to understand how very much he despised it, the hold it had on him. It had been like a mirror held up to him, a mirror which showed him not his face, but his soul, and he hadn’t liked what it showed him.

Yet accepting the darkness in his character was better than dying there. He could live with everything he had done, and everything he was going to do, so long as he didn’t have to go back there. To that planet.

Which he didn’t. It was all over now. Despite the odds, he had escaped. Wherever death finally caught up with him, it would not be on that icy tomb.

It felt good. Like a new start.

But he had to reach the
Endurance
before the others.

* * *

There was nothing to be seen of Mann’s pod but billowing, oily black smoke, and Cooper knew Romilly was dead. Mann’s story about Kipp had been pure bullshit—Kipp had collected data proving the planet was uninhabitable, and Mann had shut him down. He must have also booby-trapped him, in case anyone started prying.

Mann was Professor Brand’s protégé, all right—a liar to the core. But the professor had justified his lies as necessary to save the human race—at least that was how he saw it. Mann had lied only to save himself. Cooper remembered Mann’s comments about how the professor had made himself a monster, made the “ultimate sacrifice,” to tell the world what it needed to be told.

Had Mann really been talking about himself? Was that how he justified all of this, in that diseased mind of his?

Romilly probably never felt a thing
, Cooper thought.
Thank God.

He and Brand watched the flames, both too sunken in despair to speak.

Suddenly something burst from the smoke. For a horrible moment he thought it was Romilly, burning to death, but then the figure resolved itself into the blocky machine that it was.

Tars.

Case turned the lander and opened the airlock. Tars leapt in with a dull
whump
. Then Case aimed the lander skyward. Only one thing mattered now, Cooper knew.

Who got to the
Endurance
first.

“Do you have a fix on the Ranger?” he asked Case.

“He’s pushing into orbit,” the robot replied.

“If he takes control of the ship, we’re dead,” Cooper said.

“He’d maroon us?” Brand asked. She seemed to be having trouble coming to terms with the recent behavior of NASA’s best and brightest.

He remembered the conversation they’d had, before going into hypersleep. It seemed like a very long time ago.

“Scientists, explorers,”
she had said.
“That’s what I love. Out there we face great odds. Death. But not evil.”

As if for some reason scientists and explorers were incapable of evil.
Cortez? Haber, the guy who invented chemical warfare?

“Just what we bring with us then,”
he had told her. Well, they had brought it.

The signs had been everywhere. Too bad he hadn’t taken his own comment to heart. If he had exercised even a commonsense amount of suspicion, Romilly would still be alive. And they wouldn’t be racing against hope.

“He
is
marooning us,” Cooper said.

* * *

Lois loved Tom, but she had already lost one child, and she knew her son Coop was sick, and would only get sicker. So Murph didn’t have a hard time convincing her what was best. Now she waited nervously as Lois gathered a few things for her and the boy.

Murph glanced up the stairs.

Would she ever come here again? It didn’t seem likely, however this turned out. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to come back. She remembered happy times here with her dad and brother, with Grandpa and—in her warmest, earliest memories—her mom.

The outside of the house had always looked worn, eroded away, its paint and wood stripped by relentless years of wind and dust. She remembered Grandpa—every day, twice a day, sweeping the porch, trying to keep the dust back. And it had worked—inside the house it had been safe. It had been home.

But now it seemed hollowed out. Maybe it had begun that night when she left her window open, inviting the dust into the house. Within a matter of days, her father had been gone, and nothing was ever right again.

Without Dad and Grandpa there, the house felt like someone she had once known well, but who was now in the last stages of Alzheimer’s. A box that looked familiar, but wasn’t, and never would be again.

And yet there was something she needed to do here. One last thing.

Without really thinking about it, she let her feet carry her up the stairs and through the doorway into her old room. She heard Lois and Coop, already outside with Getty, waiting, knowing that if Tom returned now, the whole plan was doomed.

But something, something told her she needed to be here, now—and not just for Lois and Coop.

“Come on, Murph!” she heard Getty shout. But the pull was like gravity.

She had to go.

* * *

As the lander roared toward the eternal night of space, Cooper moved up beside Case. His throat and nose still stung—for all he knew, the damage might be fatal. His lungs might be about to hemorrhage or whatever, and that would be that. For the moment, however, he was alive, and he was able, so it didn’t make sense dwelling on the worst.

All that mattered was stopping Mann.

He hit the transmitter.

“Dr. Mann?” he said. “Dr. Mann, please respond.”

There was no response. In a way, he was surprised. Mann seemed awfully fond of hearing himself talk, and almost psychotically desperate to justify himself. He must, Cooper guessed, have moved beyond the need for pretty speeches. He was concentrating on reaching the
Endurance
.

That was probably bad news—it meant that Mann had written them off. And he had too great a lead for them to catch up.

“He doesn’t know the docking procedure,” Case pointed out.

“The autopilot does,” Cooper replied, thinking about how screwed they were. There was simply no way to beat him there…

“Not since Tars disabled it,” Case said.

Cooper looked over to the airlock and the singed robot that occupied it. He felt a blaze of newfound respect.

“Nice,” he said. “What’s your trust setting?”

“Lower than yours, apparently,” Tars replied.

* * *

“Dr. Mann?”
Cooper’s voice came again. Mann ignored him. What point would there be in answering him? Instead he studied the navigation panel.

“Dr. Mann, if you attempt docking—”

Mann switched off the receiver. What he didn’t need now was any sort of distraction. Not when he was this close.

* * *

Murph looked around her old room, the room that had once been her mother’s. The bookshelves that had spoken to her. Would they speak to her again? Was her ghost still here?

She waited, but the books remained in their places.

Murph spotted the box of her stuff. Cautiously, as if she feared it might contain a snake, she went to it and looked inside.

THIRTY

Mann breathed a sigh of relief as he came up on the
Endurance
. According to his instruments, he had a significant lead on the lander, giving him plenty of time to secure his position. He drew up to the larger ship, and then switched on the autopilot so it could finish the tricky business of docking.