Interstellar

After an eternity, the craft stopped rolling and settled upright. Cooper scrambled into his seat as water poured away from the canopy, and he could see their surroundings.

They were at the top of the wave. A glance at his instruments told him they were an absurd four freaking thousand feet above the surface. For a moment, the Ranger surfed along the foaming back of the leviathan, and the view was unreal. The papery clouds above, the sea stretching out in all directions, impossibly far below them, the distant back of the last wave on the horizon, a faint line of white in the other direction.

Cooper stared past the powered-down controls at the incredible fall they were about to take.

Then they took it. Once again he felt free-fall, but this time he knew there would be a stop at the end of it.

* * *

It was all a jumble of pain, terror, and near-absolute disorientation, and it seemed to last forever.

* * *

When the craft finally came to rest, Cooper groggily lurched to the control panel, his hands flying over the controls, powering up. Miraculously, everything came on, so he wasted no time in starting the engines.

They coughed. They sputtered. But they wouldn’t start.

Of course.

He felt the landing gear lift them out the water, and tried the engines again.

Still nothing.

“Too waterlogged,” Case said. “Let it drain.”

“Goddamn!” Cooper shouted, hammering the console.

“I told you to leave me,” Brand said.

“And I told you to get your ass back here,” he retorted. “Difference is, only one of us was thinking about the mission.”

“Cooper, you were thinking about getting home,” she countered. “I was trying to do the right thing!”

“Tell that to Doyle,” he shot back.

The hurt registered in her eyes, and he was glad. He looked at the clock.

“How long to drain, Case?” he asked.

“Forty-five to an hour,” the robot informed him.

Cooper shook his head and uncoupled his helmet. The cabin was pressurized. Everything smelled wet, but it didn’t smell like seawater or a pond. It smelled like distilled water that had been dumped on hot rocks—a mineral scent, but not salt.

“The stuff of life, huh?” he said. “What’s this gonna cost us, Brand?”

“A lot,” she said. “Decades.” Her voice was flat.

Cooper felt like he couldn’t breathe. Decades. Tom and Murph were adults already. How old? It seemed impossible. He rubbed his face, trying to comprehend it. He watched the wave go, knowing there would be another, and soon.

He tried to return his focus to the mission.

“What happened to Miller?” he asked.

“Judging by the wreckage,” Brand said, “she was broken up by a wave soon after impact.”

“How could the wreckage still be here after all these years?” he wondered aloud.

“Because of the time slippage,” Brand said. “On this planet’s time, she landed here just hours ago. She might have only died minutes ago.”

Case indicated the beacon, back by the airlock.

“The data Doyle received was just the initial status, echoing endlessly,” the machine said.

Cooper felt his throat closing.

“We’re not prepared for this, Brand,” he said. “You’re a bunch of eggheads without the survival skills of a Boy Scout troop.”

“We got this far on our brains,” she said defensively. “Further than any humans in history.”

“Not far enough,” he said. “And we’re stuck here till there won’t be anyone left on Earth to save.”

“I’m counting every second, same as you, Cooper,” she said.

He digested that silently for a while. He wasn’t the only one who had left someone behind. Was her father even still alive? How old had he been when they left? And then there was Edmunds, maybe waiting out there, waiting for her to come rescue him.

“Do you have some way we can jump into a black hole and get back the years?” he finally asked.

She dismissed that with a wag of her head.

“Don’t just shake your head at me!” he snapped.

“Time is relative,” Brand said. “It can stretch and squeeze—but it can’t run backward. The only thing that can move across the dimensions like time is gravity.”

He knew that. He’d read it. But he wasn’t ready to give up. Brand didn’t know everything—that much was abundantly clear.

“The beings that led us here,” he said. “They communicate through gravity. Could they be talking to us from the future?”

She was silent for a moment.

“Maybe,” she said at last.

“Well if they can—”

Brand cut him off.

“Look, Cooper,” she said, “they’re creatures of at least five dimensions. To them the past might be a canyon they can climb into, and the future a mountain they can climb up. But to us it’s not. Okay?”

She took off her helmet and regarded him frankly.

“I’m sorry, Cooper,” she said. “I screwed up. But you knew about relativity.”

“My daughter was ten,” he said bitterly. “I couldn’t explain Einstein’s theories before I left.”

“Couldn’t you tell her you were going to save the world?” Brand asked.

“No,” he said. “As a parent, I understood the most important thing—let your kids feel safe. Which rules out telling a ten-year-old that the world’s ending.”

“Cooper?” Case said urgently.