Interstellar

“Is that true?” Cooper asked Romilly. The astrophysicist nodded.

“If a black hole is an oyster,” Romilly explained, “the singularity is the pearl inside. Its gravity is so strong, it’s always hidden in darkness, behind the horizon. That’s why we call it a black hole.”

“If we could look beyond the horizon—” Cooper said.

“Some things aren’t meant to be known,” Mann told him.

That’s it? Cooper wondered. That’s all you’ve got? It seemed to him an absurd thing for a scientist to say. Like the fox in the fable, unable to reach the grapes, declaring they must be sour anyhow. But how many times in history had that declaration been made, and how often had those who said it been proven wrong?

The black hole was right there.

There had to be a way.

Mann turned to speak to Brand again.

“Your father had to find another way to save the human race from extinction,” he said. “Plan B. A colony.”

Yet Brand still wasn’t willing to give up the point. That made Cooper feel better, because he didn’t think she was acting. She hadn’t been in on it. Hadn’t been lying to him all of this time.

“But why not tell people?” Brand demanded. “Why keep building the damn station?”

“How much harder would it be for people to come together and save the species instead of themselves?” Mann gave Cooper a sympathetic glance. “Or their children?”

“Bullshit,” Cooper said flatly.

“Would you have left, if you hadn’t believed you were trying to save them?” Mann challenged. “Evolution has yet to transcend that simple barrier—we can care deeply, selflessly for people we know, but our empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight.”

“But the lie,” Brand said, her voice low and disbelieving. “The monstrous lie…”

“Unforgivable,” Mann agreed. “And he knew it. Your father was prepared to destroy his own humanity to save our species. He made the ultimate sacrifice.”

“No,” Cooper said, feeling the boil, the fury at so ludicrous a claim: that the sacrifice of one man’s reputation rose anywhere near the level of “ultimate.”

“No,” he said grimly. “That’s being made by the people of Earth, who’ll die because in his arrogance, he declared their case hopeless.”

Mann gave him a look, and under other circumstances his expression might have seemed earnest. Now it only seemed condescending.

“I’m sorry, Cooper,” he said. “Their case is hopeless. We are the future.”

Then the bottom dropped out of everything. Cooper realized that he should have known better. He had just been so damned eager to get back into space, he’d been prepared to believe any goddamn thing Professor Brand said.

“I’m asking you to trust me,” he’d said. “When you return, I’ll have solved the problem of gravity. You have my word.”

Brand put a hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t move.

“Cooper,” she said. “What can I do?”

He took a moment.

“Let me go home,” he said.

PART THREE

TWENTY-FIVE

A muddy dawn filtered through the dusty sky as Murph steered the pickup. Smoke rose in black pillars from burning fields, like offerings to some savage god of old.

“Are you sure?” Dr. Getty asked from the passenger’s seat.

“The solution was correct,” she said. “He’d had it for years.”

“It’s worthless?”

“It’s half the answer,” she said. She saw more dust ahead, probably kicked up by traffic on the road.

“How do you find the other half?” he asked.

She released one hand from the wheel and pointed to the sky.

“Out there?” she said. “A black hole. Stuck here on Earth? I’m not sure you can.”

They were near enough to see the convoy now, trucks and cars piled high with clothes, furniture—whole households of belongings reduced to what a car could hold. Their owners were packed in wherever they could find space.

“They just pack up and leave,” Getty observed in a puzzled tone. “What are they hoping to find?”

“Survival,” she said. Then she saw it—the wall of dust, the black blizzard bearing down on them like an unstoppable juggernaut.

“Dammit!” she said as it rushed over them, eclipsing the road, the empty storefronts and abandoned houses, erasing everything from their sight. Inside of the cloud, it might as well have been night.

She pulled over and turned the engine off. They sat there, the truck rocking in the wind as the dust began trying to bury them in earnest. She remembered another storm—the last one she had been in with her family, before the coordinates appeared on her bedroom floor. She remembered her father’s concentration, his determination to get them home safe.

Murph remembered, too, the validation she had felt after they reached the house, when he saw the pattern, and took it seriously. It had felt like such a victory.

And yet he had never taken the rest of it seriously.

Her ghost.

The books.