Greg Keyes - Interstellar

Cooper looked once more in the rearview mirror, but all he could see was dust. He felt tears rolling down his cheeks.

Four, three, two…

One.

“Ignition!” the flight controller said.

For an instant, Cooper thought that nothing was going to happen, that from the start it had all been some sort of weird hoax or delusion. But then he felt the vibration, the shudder that ran through the whole metal skin of the ship—awful and slow at first, like a titan stirring, but then gathering speed at a dreadful pace.

Then the light was changing, growing brighter, the sky getting closer as a huge invisible hand pressed down on him, harder and harder.

Gagarin , he thought, Shepard, Grissom, Titov, Glenn, Carpenter, Nikolayev…

The bright day was already fading as the horizon appeared in his vision. There was a sudden, gut-wrenching lurch, as the hand pressing him down came off for an instant, and his body pulled forward.

Then the G-force slammed him back into his crash couch.

“Stage one, separation,” he heard control say. He tried to imagine the huge booster dropping away, but it was hard to think of anything but the force pinning him down, the barely controlled bomb that lay behind him, hurling him toward the stars.

White, Chaffee, Komarov…

The horizon began to curve in earnest. The ship was no longer shuddering, although it was still humming with acceleration. He couldn’t move. He felt as if he weighed a thousand pounds, as if the next time he exhaled he would not be able to inhale again, and he would suffocate in his crash couch.

Then he felt suddenly as if he was falling—almost like he had been hurled from a plane—and then he weighed nothing at all.

“Stage two, separation,” control said.

Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin…

Skip ahead , he thought.

Cooper.

Because finally, incredibly—he was in space.

As soon as he could move again, he glanced around the cramped cabin at his companions to see how they were handling things. Dr. Brand, Doyle, and Romilly looked like he probably did—a little dazed.

“All here, Mr. Cooper,” the fifth member of the crew assured him. TARS, the robot who had zapped him at the fence. “Plenty of slaves for my robot colony.”

Cooper wondered if his ears—or worse, his brain—had been affected by lift-off. His confusion must have been written across his face, because Doyle stepped in.

“They gave him a humor setting,” he explained. “So he’d fit in with his unit better. He thinks it relaxes us.”

“A massive sarcastic robot,” Cooper remarked. “What a good idea.”

“I have a cue light I can turn on when I’m joking, if you like,” TARS offered.

“Probably help,” Cooper said.

“You can use it to find your way back to the ship after I blow you out of the airlock,” TARS said.

TARS “looked” at him, and Cooper looked back. He didn’t see anything that appeared to be a cue light.

The hairs on the back of his neck were beginning to prick up when an LED suddenly flashed on.

Frowning, Cooper shook his head.

“What’s your humor setting, TARS?” he asked.

“One hundred percent,” the machine replied.

Wonderful. How many months was it going to be?

“Take it down to seventy-five, please,” he said, then he turned away, glanced around to assure himself that everyone was still strapped in, and started checking the instruments.

The conjoined Rangers settled into a low orbit, and for a time there was nothing to do but wait.

Nothing wrong with that , he mused. The Ranger had a wide field of vision, giving them all a panoramic view of Earth as it turned below them. Even though he was still strapped into his crash couch, Cooper found himself rubbernecking like a tourist, watching the continents, seas, and clouds—thinking that it all seemed somehow a little unreal. The lift-off, the terrible acceleration, appeared as if long ago and now, as they spent their time in free-fall, everything felt a dream.

The planet— his planet—was as beautiful as it was fragile, and it was the only home humanity had ever known. Viewing it from out here, he found it hard to believe that she didn’t want them anymore.

He noticed that Dr. Brand was also watching the world turn below them, her expression distant.

“We’ll be back,” he told her.

She didn’t show any sign that she’d heard him, didn’t turn away from the view, but continued to stare.

“It’s hard,” he went on. “Leaving everything. My kids, your father…”

“We’re going to be spending a lot of time together,” Brand said, turning her gaze toward him.

Cooper nodded. “We should learn to talk,” he said.

“And when not to,” she replied, looking away again. “Just trying to be honest,” she added.

“Maybe you don’t need to be that honest,” he said, wincing internally. He looked over at TARS. “TARS, what’s your honesty parameter?”

TARS didn’t need a crash couch. He fit into a niche in the center of the control panel, between the manual units.

As Cooper spoke, he unlatched himself and moved toward the rear airlock.

“Ninety percent,” he responded.

“Ninety?” Cooper said. “What kind of robot are you?”

“Absolute honesty isn’t always the most diplomatic—or safe—form of communication with emotional beings,” TARS informed him.

True that , Cooper thought wryly. He turned back to Brand, and shrugged.

“Ninety percent honesty it is, then,” he said.

At first he thought he had bombed again, but then her lips traced a smile on her face. Almost imperceptible, but he was sure it was there.

Progress.

“Sixty seconds out…” The radio crackled.

Cooper decided he’d better quit while he was ahead. Besides, he was about to earn his pay. The first installment, anyway.

So he looked away from the Earth and Brand, and focused his attention on the Endurance , as they approached her. His first impression was of a wedding ring, glittering in the twin lights of the Earth and the sun.

The Rangers were sleek, winged, aerodynamic craft built for landing and taking off from planets that possessed atmospheres. Not so the Endurance —there was nothing aerodynamic about her, and any landing she made on any planet with an atmosphere would be pretty much the same sort of landing as a meteor would make: fast, fiery, and catastrophic.

Yet floating in space—where she had been built—the vessel was a thing of beauty.

She was, indeed, a ring—but only in the most basic sense, and as they drew nearer his original impression faded. He could distinguish that she was formed from a number of boxy, trapezoidal, prism-shaped modules jointed together by curved connectors. The “ring” wasn’t empty either. Access tubes led from the inner surface of the circular body to a central axis where the docking locks lay. Two ships—the landers—were already there. All she needed were the two Rangers. Feeling oddly calm, Cooper maneuvered his Ranger in, matching his velocity to that of the starship.

He’d run through the docking sequence plenty in simulations, but in the back of his mind he’d worried that the real thing would throw him some sort of curve. But he got her lined up with ease, which felt good.

“It’s all you, Doyle,” he said.

Doyle drifted toward the hatch and began the final sequence, which was sort of the tricky part. If he messed this up they would at best lose precious oxygen and at worst—well, he wasn’t sure, but it could be bad. He watched as Doyle lined up a circular array of small grapples and engaged them to bring the two ships together in an airtight seal. Each mechanical claw latched perfectly, as if Doyle had been doing this his whole life.