Interstellar

“Very graceful,” Brand managed. Cooper noticed she and Doyle were staring at him. Both of them looked a little roughed up.

“No,” he said. “But it was very efficient.”

They still just stared, but he pretty much ignored it, wondering how much time had already passed on Earth.

Days?

Months?

Better not to think about it, he decided.

“What’re you waiting for?” he barked. “Go!”

They snapped out of it then, unfastening their harnesses, checking their helmets. Case detached himself from the floor and went to the hatch. It cracked open, and light and spray blew into the cabin.

It caught Cooper, then, in his gut—they were on another world.

EIGHTEEN

Amelia followed Doyle and Case into the shallow sea. Cooper remained aboard the Ranger.

She experimented with sloshing through it as Case took a moment to orient himself. The water felt thicker, heavier than it should. More viscous. It might have been the bulk of her spacesuit, but she didn’t think so. They had practiced with those underwater, back on Earth, in preparation for the mission.

Here, though, it was different.

“This way,” Case directed. “About two hundred meters.”

Amelia looked in the direction the robot indicated. The water stretched out to the horizon, where it met a mountain range, misty with distance; one long ridge that vanished in each direction. The sight of the alien skyline arrested her for a moment, and she wished they weren’t in such a hurry. She had long dreamt of her first moments on an extra-solar planet, and this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. There should be a little ceremony, a little “That’s one small step.”

Instead they were in this tearing hurry, and it felt completely half-assed. But it was what it was. They weren’t here to set up flags and take pictures.

So she pushed forward.

Spacesuits, she decided after a few feet, were not well designed for wading. They were heavy, clumsy, and didn’t give one much of a feel for the surface on which one was walking. And that wasn’t the only thing making it difficult to make any progress.

“The gravity’s punishing,” Doyle panted.

“Floating around in space too long?” Amelia teased.

“One hundred and thirty percent Earth gravity,” Case informed them.

Right, Amelia thought. That explained a lot. This much more gravity wasn’t ideal, but it was something people couldn adapt to. Water was a good sign, and with any luck, there would be at least some habitable land at the foot of the mountains…

They pushed on, with Case still in the lead and Doyle falling behind.

* * *

After what seemed like an eternity, Case stopped.

“Should be here,” he said, and with that he began moving in a search pattern. Amelia moved to join him.

“The signal’s coming from here,” she said, but as soon as she spoke, it didn’t make any sense. The beacon should be with the ship, yet the ship clearly wasn’t here. Even if Miller had crashed, the water here wasn’t deep enough to hide the wreck.

Where had it gone?

Suddenly Case dropped down and began thrashing under the water. He looked for all the world like a film Amelia had once seen, of a bear fishing in a river. That is, if a bear were rectangular, and had metal instead of fur on its exterior.

* * *

Cooper watched Brand, Doyle, and Case with mounting unease. He could almost feel the clock in his head ticking off the time passing back on Earth. How could humanity hope to live on a world so hopelessly out of synch with the rest of the universe?

His chest began to tighten, and he took deep breaths, trying to settle himself. He stared off at the mountains. Something about them reminded him of home, but he couldn’t quite figure out why. He remembered driving toward the mountains with Murph, watching them grow larger as he followed the directions left by “them” on Murph’s floor.

But that wasn’t it. The mountains that hid the old NORAD facility were relatively young peaks; jagged, snowcapped. These formed a startlingly uniform ridge, like a long fold in the planet’s crust. And as tall as they seemed, he couldn’t make out a snowline, unless it was at the very top—that thin little film of white.

Then he realized—it wasn’t mountains he was reminded of at all. Instead, he thought of a dust storm in the distance, a black wall churning across the land.

* * *

Doyle finally caught up with them, thoroughly out of breath.

“What is he doing?” Doyle asked, nodding at the mechanical.

Case answered him by pulling something up from the seabed—if that was what it could be called. Silt streaming off of it suggested that it had been at least partially buried.

“Her beacon,” Amelia said, heart sinking. Where was Miller?

Case dutifully began carrying the beacon toward the Ranger.

“Wreckage,” Doyle said, echoing her own thoughts. “Where’s the rest?”

But she was ahead of him—she had already spotted some flotsam.

“Toward the mountains!” she said, and she starting slogging that way as quickly as she could.

Cooper’s voice crackled over the radio.