Interstellar

“This crew’s never left the simulator,” the professor said. “We can’t program this mission from Earth, and we don’t know what’s out there. We need a pilot. And this is the mission you were trained for.”

Cooper thought back to his training. Sure as hell no one had ever mentioned anything like this to him. He’d thought Mars, maybe, or Europa at the outside.

“Without ever knowing,” he said. “An hour ago, you didn’t even know I was still alive. And you were going anyway.”

“We had no choice,” Professor Brand said. “But something brought you here. They chose you.”

He felt a little chill at that, remembering Murph’s ghost, the lines in the dust, the coordinates that showed him the way to this place and these people. In the back of his mind, he’d thought he would find the mysterious messenger here, but by now it was clear that wasn’t the case.

Yet from the professor’s words, he understood that there was a messenger. It wasn’t all some figment of his imagination.

“Who’s ‘they?’” he asked.

But the professor fell silent. Cooper knew the drill. The man had baited the hook, and he was biding his time until the fish was firmly on the line.

Cooper thought about it, about the impossibility—and the possibility—of what the professor was saying.

“How long would I be gone?” he finally asked.

“Hard to know,” Brand said. “Years.”

“I’ve got my kids, professor,” he said.

The professor nodded, then looked up, solemn and serious.

“Get out there and save them,” he said.

Years, Cooper thought. Years. And yet, the chance to do this. To live in a dream that had almost faded away; to go out there, push at the boundaries of what was known. To do something that could save his kids, save everyone…

But years?

He met the professor’s gaze.

“Who’s ‘they?’” he repeated.

ELEVEN

Back in the conference room, an image of the solar system appeared on the screen, and a fellow who had been introduced to him as Romilly stood next to it.

He was a young man with a smooth, almost polished scalp, a close-cropped beard, black hair and striking dark features. He couldn’t be older than thirty-five. He seemed shy, and spoke in an odd, clipped, almost distracted fashion.

“We started detecting gravitational anomalies almost fifty years ago,” Romilly said. “Mostly small distortions in the upper atmosphere—I believe you encountered one yourself.”

At first Cooper assumed Romilly meant the pattern in Murph’s room, but then the “upper atmosphere” part registered, and his eyes widened as it came back to him.

His instruments going crazy.

Controls ripped from his hands…

“Over the Straights,” he blurted. “My crash—something tripped my fly-by wire.”

“Exactly,” Romilly said. “But the most significant anomaly was this…” Saturn suddenly took front and center, with its banded, ochre clouds, expansive rings, and mysterious moons. But when Romilly zoomed in, it wasn’t on the planet or any of its satellites, but on a small group of stars.

As the magnification increased, Cooper could see they were rippling, as if seen through a perturbed pool of water.

“A disturbance in space-time, out near Saturn,” Romilly said.

Cooper studied the disfigured constellations.

“A wormhole?” Cooper asked, doubtfully. It just didn’t seem possible.

“It appeared forty-eight years ago,” Romilly confirmed.

A wormhole, his brain repeated. A wormhole!

There were two essential problems with star travel. The first was that space was big—really big. Things were really far apart. The nearest star to Earth, other than the sun, was so far away that it took light more than four years to make the trip.

A starship traveling at half the speed of light would require more than sixteen years to make the round trip to their nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri. But that was moot, because no ship he was aware of could go even the tiniest significant fraction of the speed of light.

So a trip to Proxima would take tens of thousands of years for any ship humanity had ever built. Other stars—the ones more likely to have life-bearing planets—were much, much further away.

But a wormhole… That was the northwest passage of star travel—or more aptly, the Panama Canal—the shortcut that meant you didn’t have to sail all the way around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope, just to get from Hong Kong to New York.

Except a wormhole was better than that. It was a tunnel that just cut through all of that bothersome distance separating one place from another. And you did it in a fraction of the travel time. Relativity predicted wormholes, he remembered, but no one had ever seen one. They remained in the realm of theory.

Or so he’d thought. Yet here he was looking at one.

“Where does it lead?” Cooper asked.

“Another galaxy,” Romilly said.