Interstellar

“The first handshake,” she replied.

SEVENTEEN

Earth’s sun was nowhere near the center of its galaxy, but was in a hinterland nearer the edge of it, where the stars were thin and distant from one another—a lonely house on a great plain.

Certainly not a condo in the city.

This place, this sky beyond the wormhole, this was more like New York. Or Chicago, at least. Stars blazed everywhere, some brightly enough to leave impressions on Cooper’s retinas. Gauzy nebulae draped between and among them, coloring whole quadrants of space with light refracted through gas and dust and the fresh brilliance of newly born stars.

From Earth, the only nebulae you could see with the naked eye were tiny dull smudges that looked like blurry stars. Here they hove up like thunderheads.

If their new home was indeed going to be here, it would have a much more interesting night sky. Probably a more interesting day sky, if it came to that.

I’m in another galaxy, he thought, trying to really grasp what had just happened. The closest star to Earth was so far away a light wave would take four years to travel between them. The nearest galaxy to Earth was two-and-a-half million light years away. Two-and-a-half million years for light to make the trip. This galaxy—this one could be anywhere.

If he had a telescope powerful enough to see home from here, he wouldn’t see his kids. Dinosaurs, maybe. Or trilobites. Or a cooling fireball. Or nothing, if he was more than five billion light years from Earth. Which he could easily be. According to Romilly, folding space a trillion light years would yield no longer a journey than folding it ten miles. But the distance after the fold—

That was real.

So to reach the planets on their itinerary, they still had to make their way through a lot of vacuum.

Far from home didn’t begin to describe how he felt in that moment.

* * *

Doyle studied his workstation. The initial maneuvering done, they were all back in the ring module, processing both their feelings and the data that was pouring in.

“The lost communications came through,” Doyle informed them.

“How?” Brand asked.

“The relay on this side cached them,” he explained, as he continued to parse through it.

“Years of basic data,” he added. “No real surprises. Miller’s site has kept pinging thumbs up, as has Mann’s… but Edmunds went down three years ago.”

“Transmitter failure?” Brand asked. Cooper heard the anxiety in her voice, and felt a little sorry for her.

“Maybe,” Doyle replied. “He was sending the thumbs up right till it went dark.”

“Miller still looks good?” Romilly asked.

As Doyle affirmed that, the astrophysicist began drawing a great big circle on a whiteboard.

“She’s coming up fast,” he said. “With one complication. The planet is much closer to Gargantua than we expected.”

“Gargantua?” Cooper said, not sure he liked the sound of it.

“A very large black hole,” Doyle explained. “Miller’s and Dr. Mann’s planets orbit it.”

Brand looked at the diagram Romilly was working on. If the big circle was the circumference of Gargantua, then the orbit he was tracing was pretty much the same.

“And Miller’s is on the horizon?” Brand said.

“A basketball around the hoop,” Romilly confirmed. “Landing there takes us dangerously close. A black hole that big has a huge gravitational pull.”

Cooper studied their grave faces, wondering why they were so concerned. It seemed easy enough for them to compensate.

“Look,” he said, “I can swing around that neutron star to decelerate—”

Brand cut him off.

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s time. That gravity will slow our clock, compared to Earth’s. Drastically.”

Cooper suddenly understood their expressions. Black holes did crazy things with time. He’d even mentioned that to Murph—but he had never believed it would actually be an issue he’d need to address.

As in many things, he had been wrong.

“How bad?” he asked, thinking that he most likely didn’t want to know.

“Every hour we spend on that planet will be maybe…” She did the mental computations. “Seven years back on Earth.”

“Jesus…” Cooper breathed.

“That’s relativity, folks,” Romilly said.

Cooper felt as if the floor had been pulled out from beneath his feet. All of a sudden Miller’s world seemed a helluva lot less hospitable.

“We can’t drop down there without considering the consequences,” he said.

“Cooper, we have a mission,” Doyle said.

“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.”