Interstellar

“You don’t find that every day,” Brand conceded.

“No, you do not,” Doyle agreed, his blue eyes flaring. “So think about the resources it would take to come back here…”

Yeah, Cooper granted. He’s got a point. In essence, getting from Miller’s planet to Mann’s would require climbing out of the deep gravitational well of Gargantua. It would be like swimming upstream, against the current. Which probably wouldn’t leave enough fuel for a return trip to Earth. If the choice was between getting back a little late and not getting back at all, he knew where he fell out.

“How far back from the planet would we have to stay to be out of the time shift?” Cooper asked.

Romilly pointed to his whiteboard drawing of the massive black hole and the planet skimming just above its horizon.

“Just back from the cusp,” he said.

“So we track a wider orbit of Gargantua,” Cooper said. “Parallel with Miller’s planet but a little further out… Take a Ranger down, grab Miller and her samples, debrief, and analyze back here.”

“That’ll work,” Brand said.

“No time for monkey business or chitchat down there,” Cooper emphasized. “Tars, you’d better wait up here. Who else?”

Romilly lifted his head.

“If we’re talking about a couple of years—I’d use that time to work on gravity—observations from the wormhole,” he said. “This is gold to Professor Brand.”

A couple of years, Cooper thought. He glanced at Romilly, and wondered if the man really understood what he was saying. He would be here—alone—for years. Of the four of them, Romilly had proven the least comfortable in space, the most susceptible to its physical and psychological perils.

Yet he would also be the least useful on the surface, and the most useful up here.

It felt like a huge decision to make in so little time, and not just because of Romilly.

Like Brand said, though, time was as much a resource to them as air. It wasn’t just seeing his kids again. If they lost too much time, there would be no human race to save, except for the embryos they’d brought with them. End result: no plan A.

And he was determined that there would be a plan A, come hell or high water.

“Okay,” he said. “Tars, factor an orbit of Gargantua—minimal thrusting, conserve fuel—but stay in range.”

“Don’t worry,” Tars said. “I wouldn’t leave you behind…” Abruptly he turned away from Cooper. “…Dr. Brand,” he finished, with a comic’s timing.

Cooper wondered if it might be a good idea to bring the robot’s humor setting down another notch or two.

* * *

Amelia Brand considered the black hole.

If the wormhole was a three-dimensional hole you could see through—albeit in a distorted fashion—Gargantua was a three-dimensional hole into nothing.

The average black hole had in some distant past been a star, and probably a really big one, merrily fusing hydrogen into helium, pushing enough energy out to keep its own gravity from making it collapse. But eventually, over billions of years, the hydrogen had all burned out, and it had to start using helium for fuel. And when the helium was all gone, it turned to progressively heavier and heavier elements.

Until one day it lost its fight with the gravity it had itself created. The force keeping it shining and inflated wasn’t enough to counter its mass. So it collapsed, victorious gravity crushing its atoms into denser and denser substances until finally crushing the atoms themselves in neutrons. The physical size of the star became less and less, but its gravity grew exponentially. In the end, even light couldn’t escape its pull, but it could still grow, swallowing nebulae, planets, stars.

Yet Gargantua was anything but “average.” Formed when the universe was young, perhaps at the center of a galaxy, it may have been the product of many smaller black holes, merging until its mass was at least a hundred million times that of the Earth’s sun.

Present-day Gargantua was frightening in its seeming nothingness. Yet past its horizon, past the point of no return, beyond which even light could not come back, Amelia could see an effect—a glowing disk surrounded the black hole, gas and particles captured by the immense gravity, whirling around it like water going down a spherical drain. So incredibly fast was the spin that the atoms collided with one another, hurling bursts of energy into the cloud, quickening it with light and blowing like a wind back out through the disk, creating plasma arabesques of breathtaking beauty.

But deeper, where that eldritch, glowing shroud met the Gargantua’s event horizon… was a horrifying nothingness.

“A literal heart of darkness,” Doyle said.

That didn’t seem sufficient to Amelia—as if the man was damning Gargantua with faint praise. She pointed, drawing his gaze from the terrifying naught of the black hole to a small, glowing point.

“That’s Miller’s planet,” she said.

* * *

Cooper turned to Case, the robot, who was riding shotgun in the copilot’s seat.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yup,” the robot replied.

“Don’t say much, do you?” Cooper said wryly.