Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization (24 page)

But gravity could. Like Tars said, gravity cut across and through all of the dimensions. When he punched at one of them, what he was really doing was sending a pulse through space-time, a gravitic surge that was responsible for moving the books.

In other words, he was the source of a gravitational anomaly, and “they” had given him control of it in the most natural way possible—by making his sense of self, his sense of body, the controller. By giving images—icons—that he could understand and exert that force upon.

He realized suddenly that there might be a point to this. Something beyond watching himself make the biggest mistake of his life, over and over again. He just had to understand the tools he had been given, and determine what to do with them.

He pulled himself back to the wall and started counting books.

“You have the quantum data now,” Cooper said to Tars.

“I’m transmitting it on all wavelengths,”
Tars confirmed,
“but nothing’s getting out.”

“I can do it…” Cooper breathed.

He reached for one of the timelines—
worldlines, really
, he mused—and plucked at it. To his delight, a wave ran up the line, like a guitar string vibrating, affecting that book slightly, wherever and whenever it was.

“Such complicated data,”
Tars said.
“Sending it to a child…”

“Not just any child,” Cooper said.

* * *

Murph stood in the darkening room, looking at her notebook, puzzling at it. She knew there must be more now. An answer…

Her father had been here, as the ghost.

Where is he now?

“Murph!” Getty hollered, sounding more frantic than ever. “Come on!”

THIRTY-FOUR

Cooper saw Murph staring out the window, and knew his earlier self was driving away. Toward NASA, the
Endurance
—this.

“Even if you communicate it here,”
Tars reasoned,
“she wouldn’t recognize its significance for years…”

He began to become angry. After all the fear and frustration, the feelings that burned up through him provided a welcome change.

“Then figure something out!” he snapped. “Everybody on Earth is going to die!”

“Cooper,”
Tars said,
“They didn’t bring us here to change the past.”

Of course they didn’t.
Cooper paused, calming himself. No, he couldn’t change the past. But there was something else… something about what Tars was saying.

They didn’t bring us here to change the past.

They…

“We brought ourselves here,” he said, and he pushed off, found another angle, saw the room in a slightly different moment. It was full of dust from the storm, the storm that had come upon them at the baseball game. Murph had left her window open…

“Tars,” he said, studying the dust. “Feed me the coordinates of NASA in binary.”

And with his fingers, he traced the pattern, the lines he had found after the dust storm—

* * *

She ran her finger along the windowsill and examined the dust on it, remembering the pattern on the floor that day, how happy she was that she had been vindicated, that her father believed her. Sort of. But he had never believed all of it. Only the part he
wanted
to believe, that part that said he had been chosen to go into space. The ghost he had discounted.

And yet he
was
the ghost. Both. Giving himself the coordinates that would lead him to NASA, but also telling himself to stay.

A contradiction. Like gravity itself.

She looked around the room, searching for something to reconcile it. This was her last shot. Tom would never let her in here again.

“Come on, Dad,” she pleaded. “Is there something else here?”

* * *

Cooper looked up from the pattern he was tracing.

“Don’t you see, Tars?” he said. “I brought
myself
here. We’re here to communicate with the three-dimensional world. We’re the bridge.”

He moved along to another version of the room. Murph was there, jumping up from the bed, grabbing the watch from where she had thrown it, running out the door…

* * *

Murph reached into the box and picked up the watch, thinking about the little moment of hope, the little experiment she and her father were going to do together, until she realized just how long he was going to be gone, that he didn’t even know if he was coming back. And then she had thrown it, rejected him and his damn attempt at “making things right.”

Then she had picked it up again. And kept it. And waited. And he hadn’t returned. They had never been able to compare them.

She put it on the bookshelf.

The second hand twitched.

* * *

Cooper pushed himself along the lines of the books, following their positions in time.

“I thought they chose me,” Cooper said. “They never chose me. They chose Murph.”

“For what?”
Tars asked.

“To save the world!” Cooper replied.

He watched ten-year-old Murph come back into the room, crying her eyes out, holding the timepiece. It was hard to watch, but he did.

After a moment she put the watch on a shelf.

* * *

Murph sighed and put the box on the shelf. If there had ever been anything else here, it was gone now. She had to salvage what she could. And right now that meant saving Lois and Coop.

* * *

Cooper was “moving” fast now, following the room through space-time. Watching it go from being Murph’s bedroom, to abandoned, to glimpses of what might be a little boy, although he never got a clear view.

“‘They’d have access to infinite time, infinite space,” he told Tars, gesturing all around him. “But no way to find what they need. But I can find Murph and find a way to tell her—like I found this moment…”

“How?”
Tars asked.

“Love, Tars,” he said. “Love, just like Brand said. That’s how we find things here.” Love, like gravity, which could move across time and dimensions.

Brand had been spot on.

“So what are we to do?”
Tars asked.

Cooper looked down the time dimension. The books? No, and not the lander. But the watch, on the shelf, as far as he could see…

“The watch,” he realized. “That’s it. She’ll come back for it.”

“How do you know?”
Tars asked.

And again he felt the certainty, a pull as strong as a black hole. Stronger—it was like the pull that had brought him here. That would bring Murph back, too.

“Because I gave it to her,” he said, excitement building. He scrutinized the watch for a moment. It would have to be simple, binary, or…

He had it.

“We use the second hand,” he told Tars. “Translate the data into Morse, and feed it to me.”

He grabbed the timeline that connected to the second hand in all of its iterations, and as the data came in he tugged it in time, long and short—dots and dashes.

“What if she never came back for it?”
Tars asked.

“She will,” he insisted, as the second hand began flicking back and forth. “She will. I can feel it…”

* * *

Murph was turning to leave when Getty shouted—near hysterically—that Tom was coming. But still something held her. She went back to the box, knowing what she was going for, and pulled out the watch. Feeling it, then seeing it.

“Murph?” Getty yelled. “Murph!”

* * *

When she came tearing out of the house, Getty was holding a tire iron, watching an angry Tom climb from the truck, black with soot. Lois and Coop were watching, too, fearful looks on their faces.

But Murph ran straight for her brother.

“Tom,” she said. “He came back… he came back.”

Tom’s fierce expression tempered a bit toward puzzlement.

“Who?” he asked, gruffly, confusion wrestling with anger in his voice.

“Dad,” she told him. “It was him. He’s going to save us.”

Triumphantly she held up the watch—and its weirdly flickering second hand.

* * *

Murph looked at the equations she had just written, then back to the watch. She stood, gathering the pages, and hurried through the halls. In her haste she bumped into someone, and was absently aware that it was Getty, but she didn’t slow her pace.

She remembered her first time here, with her dad, how terrifying it had been, followed quickly by awe-inspiring. Now, after all these years, it was home.

She reached the launch bay, the gigantic cylindrical space station that had never been intended to fly, had been nothing more than busy work to keep everyone who knew the truth from curling up into a ball and staying that way.

She remembered the pride Professor Brand had showed in the thing, even though he believed it would never function.

She walked up to the railing, marveling at it, at the thousands of workers who were still on the job. Getty stepped up beside her, having followed, and he wore a curious look on his face.

Then she turned back to the enormous hollow, and shouted at the top of her lungs.

“
Eu-RE-ka!
”

She turned her grin on Getty.

“Well, it’s traditional,” she said. Then she threw her papers over the railing.

“Eureka!” she repeated, as the papers fluttered down and workers looked curiously at her.

Then she planted a kiss right on the lips of a very surprised and confused Dr. Getty.

* * *

Cooper gazed along the worldline of the watch, saw that it seemed to branch out infinitely.

“Did it work?” he asked Tars.

“I think it might have,” Tars replied.

“Why?” Cooper said, hopefully.

“Because the bulk beings are closing the tesseract,” Tars replied.

Cooper gazed again off into the distance and saw that something, at least, was happening. The lines were becoming sheets, becoming bulks, as the three-dimensional representation created for his only-human brain unraveled and returned to its full five-dimensional reality. It was like the universe was collapsing in on him, which he supposed in a sense it was.

“You don’t get it yet, Tars?” Cooper asked. “‘They’ aren’t
beings
—they’re
us
. Trying to help, just like I tried to help Murph…”

“People didn’t build this tesseract,” Tars said.

“Not yet,” Cooper replied. “But one day. Not you and I, but people—people who’ve evolved beyond the four dimensions that we know.”

As the expansion back into five dimensions came upon him, Cooper thought of Murph, and Tom—and hoped he had saved them. He thought he had, or at least played a part. There wasn’t much more that he could ask.

“What happens now?” he wondered aloud.

But then he was swept away, as if by a massive wave, like the Ranger back on Miller’s world. But that wave had only lifted and dropped him. No, this was more like a fast-moving river.

Or a riptide.

In the current, and beyond it, he saw stars and planets being born, dying, decaying into particles, then being born again, faster and faster—through space-time, above space-time, a piece of paper bending, a pen poking a hole through it…

Where was he going now? He was done, wasn’t he? He’d accomplished what he was meant to do—it was up to Murph now. And Brand.

He wondered where Brand was, how she was doing. He wished he could explain to her why he’d had to leave her alone.

Ahead he saw a glassy, golden distortion, and in it the
Endurance
, and for a split second he thought his wish had brought him to her—but then he saw that this
Endurance
was like new, undamaged, just entering the wormhole. He drifted through the bulkhead and saw Brand and Romilly there, both strapped in.

Brand
, he thought, reaching toward her. In a way, he
had
gotten his wish. Could he communicate with her? Probably not, or at least nothing important, since this was the past, and she hadn’t known that any of this was going to happen.

To his surprise, she saw him. She reached her hand up to his, and he realized there
was
something he could communicate. Something that maybe was important. So he reached back, hoping to feel the warmth of her hand, give it an affectionate squeeze. But when their fingers came together they mingled, distorting each other but not really touching. A quiet moment in the chaos.

He watched her face, the wonder on it.

Then, abruptly, he was swept on. The sulfurous orb of Saturn suddenly loomed immense in his vision…

Then quiet.

THIRTY-FIVE

Cooper opened his eyes to the crack of a baseball bat, a faint breeze and gauzy sunlight. He blinked, trying to get his bearings.

He was no longer in a spacesuit. He lay in bed, tucked into crisp white sheets. The bed was in a room, and the room had a window that looked, not into space—but into light. The view was obscured by net curtains, but he could hear children laughing beyond it.

“Mr. Cooper?” someone asked. “Mr. Cooper?”

He looked up and found a young man with a pronounced chin and green eyes staring down at him. At his side was a woman with black hair in a ponytail. He didn’t know either of them, but as his brain picked up a little speed he saw that they were dressed in medical clothing—and he realized the bed was a hospital bed.

He sat up, trying to remember. He had seen Brand, and then had the stuffing knocked out of him. And Saturn…

He had been pitched back into the space around Saturn, two years from Earth and any possible rescue.

So why wasn’t he dead?

“Take it slow, sir,” the man—a doctor, he saw now—cautioned. “Remember you’re no spring chicken anymore.” He smiled. “I gather you’re—” The doctor referred to the chart in his hand. “—one hundred and twenty four years old.”

Cooper didn’t feel any older than when he’d left.

Time slippage, he thought.

“You were extremely lucky,” he continued. “The Ranger found you with only minutes left in your oxygen supply.”

Rangers? Around Saturn? Why? Had there been another expedition?

“Where am I?” he asked.