Interstellar

Should’ve dropped it down the hole, he realized, but he wasn’t going back there now.

He felt the shudder in the ice first, and then the sound and shock blew through him, frozen particles streaking past on the front of the concussion. At first he thought there had been some random shifting in the frozen masses and the ice had broken, but then he saw the black smoke churning from a nearby hilltop.

His hilltop. Where he’d lain so long in exile.

Where Kipp was.

He felt a fresh surge of terror. This was all spinning out of control.

“Dammit, Romilly,” he muttered. He’d warned him, hadn’t he? It wasn’t his fault.

He switched his radio back on. Brand’s voice greeted him.

“Come on, Cooper,” she was saying. “Just a couple more steps…”

Well that tears it, he thought. He had known he would have to deal with Cooper, but he’d hoped to have the others as companions in the mission. Desperately hoped. He didn’t want to be alone again. That was what had broken him, the solitude. If there was any thought that was intolerable, it was to be alone again.

But now he had no choice. There could be no mending this with Cooper. Romilly was certainly dead, and they would blame that on him, too.

Brand…

Still, he could hold onto the fact that this time it wouldn’t be forever. There was still Edmunds’ world, and plan B. He wouldn’t be alone for the rest of his life. Wolf might still be alive, and there was no need for him to know anything about this… unpleasantness. And whether he survived or not, there would be the children. He could take the isolation again, as long as he knew there would be an end to it.

And maybe—once he had some leverage over her—he might be able to salvage Brand. Somehow. No one had a greater stake in this mission than she did. So that it might succeed, she might be made to see the realities.

Before he could appeal to her sense of reason, however, her sense of mission, he had to have the upper hand. Had to hold all of the cards.

He hurried toward the Ranger.

* * *

“Brand, I’m sorry,” Cooper wheezed, as soon as the respirator was off of his face. “Mann lied—”

As he spoke, a look of comprehension swept across her face.

“Oh, no,” she gasped.

* * *

As Murph roared up to the house, Tom’s truck was nowhere to be seen.

That was as planned—he would be fighting the fire she had set, trying to salvage the crop.

“Keep watch,” she told Getty as she jerked the door open. Then she took off running toward the front door.

“Lois!” she called out as she hit the porch.

* * *

“There’s been an explosion,” Case informed them, as the lander rose and pivoted amid clouds of steam and frost.

“Where?” Brand asked.

“Dr. Mann’s compound,” he replied, as they leapt skyward.

Romilly, Cooper thought. Tars. Tars was with him.

What had Mann done to them?

* * *

Mann strapped into the Ranger, gave the systems a quick once-over, and then started the engines. As the ship shot into the air, he felt a sudden, unexpected exhilaration.

This planet had been his prison, and for most of the time he had believed it would be his tomb. It had made him do things he never thought himself capable of doing, and only now did he allow himself to understand how very much he despised it, the hold it had on him. It had been like a mirror held up to him, a mirror which showed him not his face, but his soul, and he hadn’t liked what it showed him.

Yet accepting the darkness in his character was better than dying there. He could live with everything he had done, and everything he was going to do, so long as he didn’t have to go back there. To that planet.

Which he didn’t. It was all over now. Despite the odds, he had escaped. Wherever death finally caught up with him, it would not be on that icy tomb.

It felt good. Like a new start.

But he had to reach the Endurance before the others.

* * *

There was nothing to be seen of Mann’s pod but billowing, oily black smoke, and Cooper knew Romilly was dead. Mann’s story about Kipp had been pure bullshit—Kipp had collected data proving the planet was uninhabitable, and Mann had shut him down. He must have also booby-trapped him, in case anyone started prying.

Mann was Professor Brand’s protégé, all right—a liar to the core. But the professor had justified his lies as necessary to save the human race—at least that was how he saw it. Mann had lied only to save himself. Cooper remembered Mann’s comments about how the professor had made himself a monster, made the “ultimate sacrifice,” to tell the world what it needed to be told.

Had Mann really been talking about himself? Was that how he justified all of this, in that diseased mind of his?

Romilly probably never felt a thing, Cooper thought. Thank God.

He and Brand watched the flames, both too sunken in despair to speak.

Suddenly something burst from the smoke. For a horrible moment he thought it was Romilly, burning to death, but then the figure resolved itself into the blocky machine that it was.