Interstellar

“I actually did a paper on you in high school, sir,” the fellow said. “I know all about your life on Earth…” They entered what would have been a quite ordinary town square had it not been in orbit around Saturn.

“So when I made my suggestion to Ms. Cooper, I was delighted to hear she thought it was perfect.”

Cooper stopped, staring, at a farmhouse. No, scratch that. The farmhouse, his house, the same porch where he and Donald drank beers in the evening. The place where his kids were born, where Murph had turned her back to him.

But cleaner—it looked like they had painted it.

As he drew nearer, a monitor came to life, and an old man appeared on it.

“May 14th” the image said. “Never forget. Clear as a bell. You’d never think…”

Now Cooper saw another man’s face, also old.

“When the first of the real big ones rolled in,” he said, “I thought it was the end of the world.”

“Of course,” Cooper’s guide said, “I didn’t speak to her personally.”

“Sure, my dad was a farmer…” the monitor continued, this time a woman’s voice, quavering with age, but then they were in the house, the door closing off the narration. Another screen woke as they entered the kitchen, more old people talking about the dust, Cooper realized.

His house was now a museum exhibit.

“But she confirmed just how much you loved farming,” the administrator finished, proudly.

“She did, huh?” Cooper said. Well, the least Murph deserved was a little joke at his expense. So he was going to live in a museum, and be its chief exhibit? Do a little hobby-farming to show the kids?

He noticed one thing in the house that didn’t fit the pastoral scene in the least—a robot, quite familiar in form.

“Is that…?”

“The machine we found near Saturn when we found you, yes,” the man confirmed. “Its power source was shot, but we could get you another, if you want to try and get it up and running again.”

Cooper nodded.

“Please,” he said.

* * *

That evening, Cooper went back to the hangar and watched the Rangers coming in from patrol, admiring their sleek lines, envying the pilots as they left their cockpits so the crews could wheel the craft into their resting places.

He wasn’t altogether sure what brought him there. Only a few days ago—his time—he had been doing his level best to return to Earth and never see space—or a spaceship—ever again. Now—well, now he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. That plan A had happened—that he had been able to help, and that Murph had managed to go from data to… this, was more than gratifying. It was more than he could ask. But there was a downside to being a hundred and twenty-four.

He would never see Tom again. His son had passed almost two decades ago, and his son Coop—Cooper’s grandson—was biologically old enough to be his father. Almost everyone he knew was dead—except Murph.

As for Murph—he didn’t know how that was going to go. For him, less than a year had passed since they sat together on her bed. For her, however, it had been a lifetime. He had been gone for most of her life. How did he apologize for that?

Sighing, he made his way back to the transplanted farmhouse, but he didn’t hurry. Instead he took in the strange sights of Cooper Station.

Like the Endurance, the huge cylinder spun on its axis. The opening through which his ship had lifted off, so long ago, was essentially the station’s North Pole. It was also the sun. The mirrors he remembered from the days when this place was a launch chamber—the ones that reflected sunlight down its vast shaft—had been replaced by really enormous mirrors, large enough to focus the light of Saturn’s faint sun, yielding enough to illuminate the interior of Cooper Station. Computers kept them tracked and focused, and at dusk folded them up to simulate Earth’s sleep cycle, or at least something like it.

Edmunds’ world didn’t have the same length day-and-night cycles as Earth, and since the eventual goal was to live there, Cooper Station—and her sister stations—were gradually modifying the length of each day. The human circadian rhythm had been the same for millions of years, and asking a body to change too quickly was generally considered to be a bad idea.

He wondered how Brand was doing with that. How she was doing, period. Had she made it? The time dilation had been the same for them. As he popped out into space near Saturn, she was still on course to Edmunds’ world. She was either there, or would be soon. But when he considered everything she would have to accomplish, and all on her own, just to reach Edmunds’ World—the course corrections, placing the Endurance into a stable orbit. Loading the population bomb onto the lander—along with anything else she would ever need, since there wasn’t enough fuel to go back up once the lander had descended.