Interstellar

People had always called Cooper stubborn, but he had always thought of himself more as realistic, and perhaps a bit—persistent. Just now he felt something harden in him and compress, like coal being squeezed into a diamond.

He knew, intellectually, that he was going to die someday. He wasn’t exactly okay with it, but facts were facts. One day, he would, in fact, go into that “good night.” But not today, quietly or any other way. And not by Mann’s hands.

No way.

Wasn’t going to happen.

His mind boiled away everything but what he needed to know, what he needed to see—and then he saw it, just a few feet away.

The long-range transmitter.

Summoning everything he had, he began crawling toward it, even as black spots began to dance before his eyes and his chest felt as if it were going to explode.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

* * *

Mann looked back down at Cooper, his tortured coughing and choking as clear in his ears as if he were right there. He had wondered if he would feel regret. He supposed it was still too early to tell. Cooper was still trying, still struggling, still somehow hoping to survive. It was the most magnificent thing he had ever witnessed. He wished the pilot could somehow understand why it was necessary.

He turned away and used his jets to return to the higher ground, and then looked back once more at the feebly thrashing figure.

“Cooper,” he said. “Do you see your children yet?”

The only answer was more hacking, and it was all suddenly too much for Mann. It must be so lonely to die, even when someone was with you.

A wave of unanticipated terror swept through him, and he turned off the radio, unable to even listen anymore. Cooper was still moving, a small figure, but at least now he was silent.

Mann put his back to it, and went to do what he must.

* * *

Cooper grasped the transmitter, but his gloves might as well have been mittens as he struggled to reconnect it. He tried to slow down, to get it right, but everything was fading, and if he didn’t do it soon, it wouldn’t get done at all.

But he couldn’t do it. Not with the gloves on.

So he pulled them off. He felt the cold again—it struck through his hands and up his arms, encircling his heart, but he could feel; for a few seconds the sensation was energizing. But then everything was shaking, and his fingers wouldn’t stay still…

Then the transmitter clicked into place.

“Brand!” he rasped out. “Brand! Help me! Help…”

* * *

And elsewhere, on a dusty plain, Murph knew what she had to do. She wheeled the truck around and floored it.

* * *

Brand leapt into the cockpit, Cooper’s fading voice still ringing in her ears. What had happened? Cooper sounded like he was asphyxiating, and she hadn’t heard anything at all from Mann. Was the scientist dead already?

“I have a fix,” Case said, as the engines cut in.

“Cooper?” she said. “Cooper, we’re coming.”

“No air,” he wheezed. “Ammonia.”

“Don’t talk,” she said. Breathe as little as possible—we’re coming.”

* * *

Murph pulled off the road and blew into one of Tom’s cornfields, cutting through it as Getty sat wide-eyed and white-knuckled in the passenger seat. As she watched the corn part around the bumper, she remembered that long-ago day when they had chased the Indian drone, the three of them—Dad, Tom, and her.

The last time they had done anything together. Tom driving, her keeping the antenna fixed, Dad cracking the encryption. They’d been a team, a family.

Only a day later, all of that had been blown to hell. And now, Tom thought she was the enemy.

Well—she was about to be.

* * *

Brand tried to keep steady as Case wove somewhat more than recklessly through the ice formations, avoiding collision sometimes by no more than inches.

It was the same sick feeling in her belly as the one she’d felt when she saw the wave bearing down on them on Miller’s world—the realization that not only was everything they knew not enough, but sometimes it actively hurt them. All of her instincts had told her that a few inches of water was harmless, and that big fluffy clouds were nothing to worry about.

Every assumption they made here was a disaster in the making.

She didn’t know how Mann’s world had deceived them this time, but she hoped desperately that Case knew what he was doing, where he was going, because Cooper couldn’t have much time left.

* * *

In Mann’s pod, Romilly was still trying to comprehend what he was seeing, and not really getting anywhere. He felt a renewed sense of the frustration he’d felt on the Endurance; years alone with the data, talking to himself, on the verge of going crazy—and occasionally maybe veering over that verge.