Interstellar

“Those aren’t mountains,” he said. His voice sounded strange. She paused and looked at the range again. Did they seem a little more distant?

It had to be some sort of optical illusion.

“They’re waves…” Cooper’s disembodied voice told her.

That went through her like an electrical shock. Not waves, but a wave… one unbelievably huge wave. She could see the tiny white line of foam at the top of it. How high was it? A mile? More? Perspective made it impossible to tell.

It was moving away from them, thank God.

She had to get the recorder. It had to be here. She plowed through the water toward the wreckage.

* * *

Cooper heard some bumping below as Case loaded the beacon. He watched the monster wave recede and then, a peculiar feeling in his gut, he turned to look in the direction it had come from.

And saw the next one looming over them, blotting out the sky.

“Brand, get back here!” he shouted frantically into the comm.

“We need the recorder,” she protested.

Before he could say anything, Doyle’s voice sputtered over the radio.

“Case,” Doyle shouted. “Go get her!”

Cooper slammed his fist into the dash.

What the hell is Brand doing?

“Dammit!” he yelled. “Brand, get back here!”

But she was still out there, looking through the junk in the water.

“We can’t leave without her data,” Brand insisted.

“You don’t have time!” he replied.

He saw Case pass Doyle, who was headed back toward the Ranger, struggling against water and gravity.

“Go, go!” Doyle yelled at the robot.

Case blew past him, churning a wake as he made a beeline toward Brand, reconfigured in wheel-like form.

Cooper ran to the hatch and swung it open. In the distance, he saw Brand trying to lift something out of the water. He looked back at the approaching wave, knowing that it must be thousands of feet high, trying to judge how close it was, how fast it was moving, but the scale made it difficult for his mind to comprehend.

“Get back here, now!” he hollered.

Brand pulled something up. He couldn’t see what it was, but after a moment of struggle she slipped and fell backward. Whatever it was came down on top of her.

She didn’t get back up, although he could see her arms moving. Her face turned toward him, and even at that distance he saw it turn up, focused on the mountain of water hurtling toward them.

“Cooper, go!” she yelled. “Go! I can’t make it.”

“Get up, Brand!” he commanded.

“Go! Get out of here!”

But then Case was there. He flipped the junk away from her, heaved her onto his back, and raced back toward the Ranger.

That’s when Cooper noticed Doyle, just standing there, transfixed by the impossible wave.

“Doyle!” he shouted. “Come on! Case has her!”

The man shook it off and started running back as best he could, struggling with every step.

Cooper jumped back up into the cockpit and started powering up. All he could see now was the wave.

“Come on, come on…” he muttered. Time was almost up.

Desperate, he ran back to the hatch. Doyle had made it to the foot of the ladder, and Case was arriving with Brand. Puffing, Doyle stepped aside to make way for the robot and its passenger.

“Go!” Doyle said.

Case obediently pushed past him, jerking himself up the ladder and unceremoniously dumping Brand inside the ship. Then he turned to help Doyle, who was struggling to ascend the ladder himself.

Before he could get there, the Ranger suddenly jumped up as the leading edge of the surge heaved them out of the shallow trough and up the side of the wave. The Ranger tilted sharply and seawater slapped Doyle back, out of Case’s grip, as it came raging across the hatch. The ship was lifted and everything went sideways.

That fast—the blink of an eye—Doyle was gone.

For that second, Cooper was without emotion. He saw Doyle swept away and knew with crystalline certainty that there was absolutely nothing he could do. Nothing but try to save himself and the others.

“Shut the hatch!” he told Case.

Case obeyed as Cooper stumbled across the tilting deck back to the controls.

“Power down! Power down!” he said. “We have to ride it out.” Emotion returned in a rush. He felt like a coward for abandoning Doyle, although he still understood it would have meant the end of all of them to keep the hatch open. But mostly he felt simple, unadorned fury.

And he turned it on Brand.

“We were not prepared for this!” he shouted.

They were already hundreds of feet in the air, sucked sideways up the mountain of water, and Cooper found himself tossed like a doll across the cockpit as the Ranger began to roll. He managed to grab Brand and jam her into her seat, and after that it was all he could do not to vomit or lose consciousness as everything turned around him.

It was like the Straights all over again; all control gone, at the mercy of the universe…

NINETEEN