Interstellar

But it might already be too late. They were still falling, and Endurance was starting to burn in earnest, parts melting and sloughing off of her, becoming meteorites that streaked into the atmosphere.

Cooper eased on the main thrusters, fearful of breaking her up.

“Come on,” he said. “You can do it…”

The powerful engine began to slow their fall, but they were so close, so deep in the atmosphere…

The moments stretched, as if they were once again in the grip of the black hole—as if hours or days were dragging by, rather than just a handful of crucial seconds. Cooper felt their fall slow almost glacially, then stop.

And then—finally, painfully, they started back up out of the gravity well that was Mann’s world. The horizon dropped away behind them. Only then daring to breathe, Cooper pulled back on the sticks and allowed himself a silent moment of triumph.

Brand stirred. Cooper turned to Case, allowing himself a real smile.

“Right.” he said. “And now for our next trick…”

“It’ll have to be good,” Case informed him. “We’re heading into Gargantua’s pull.”

Dammit! Cooper thought. Some days there just weren’t enough doors to slam. He unbuckled his harness.

“Take her,” he told Case.

* * *

The Endurance was a mess inside. Everything that could tear loose had done so, along with a few things that supposedly couldn’t. Without gravity, the debris swirled around crazily, kicked everywhere by jets of steam and air from as-yet unpatched ruptures in the ship’s hull and fluid circulatory systems.

Case and Tars went to deal with the worst of those, while he and Brand took inventory of the rest of the ship.

So far as Cooper could tell, the population bomb was still intact and functional. Brand would do a more thorough analysis later. Personally, he found he hated the sight of the thing. It might mean life for the human race, but it represented the death of his children. In fact, it was more than that. The human race was more than a collection of solitary biological organisms. It was the end result of a million years of existence as a species—a million years of stories, myths, relationships, ideas both important and nonsensical, poetry, philosophy, engineering—science.

Being human was to inherit from a parent, a sibling, a family, a community, a town, a culture, a civilization. Humans hadn’t just been biological objects since before they became human.

Sure, he and Brand could bring a few thousand biologically human entities into existence with this thing, but could the two of them really substitute for the immense web of heritage, affiliation—love? Was that really saving the human race? Salvaging a single seed from a forest before it was burnt to the ground didn’t mean you had saved the forest. You could never replicate its baroque, unique ecosystem. Unfreezing human embryos was not going to “save” the human race.

The human race as he knew it was going to die. Whatever came out of this machine, it would be something different. Maybe better, maybe worse—but not the same.

Case was flagging for his attention.

“We’re slipping towards Gargantua,” the mechanical informed him. “Shall I use the main engines?”

“No!” Cooper said, firmly. “Let her slide as long as we can.” He had been thinking about this. He couldn’t be sure of everything until he had a fine-tuned sense of their status, but he knew already that fighting Gargantua wasn’t going to get them anywhere.

He pushed off and flew to where Tars was welding a bulkhead.

“Give it to me,” he said.

“There’s good news and bad news,” Tars began.

“I’ve heard that, Tars,” he replied. “Just give it to me straight.”

* * *

Amelia felt a shiver of dread as Cooper came in. It seemed as if they were trapped in a loop of disasters, one after another. Whatever news he might have, the odds were it couldn’t be good.

She had been trying to stay occupied with the particulars of her duties—primarily making certain that they could still implement plan B. The population bomb had been roughed up enough that she’d needed to overhaul the cryonics, which she had managed to accomplish with a little help from Case. It was a makeshift fix that required cannibalizing Romilly’s cryo-bed, but then again, he wasn’t going to need it. Once they made planetfall, she could use some parts of the Endurance they still needed to rig a more reliable system. They couldn’t thaw all of the embryos at once—the bomb would need to continue working for decades, at least.

She wondered how many children she and Cooper would be able to manage, now that it was just the two of them. Five? Ten?

At least he had some experience along those lines.

You want a big family, Coop? It was going to be an odd conversation to have. Probably a painful one, too—at least for him.