Greg Keyes - Interstellar

With that, the Endurance was complete.

Once Amelia Brand’s primate brain stopped screaming that she was falling and needed to grab on to something, zero gravity turned out to be great fun. The slightest push sent her flying around effortlessly in a way she had never imagined—not even in her dreams.

It was almost too bad it had to end.

As they boarded the Endurance , it became clear that it wasn’t as roomy as it looked from the outside. Part of this was because two-thirds of each of the modules was taken up by storage. The floors, the walls—almost every surface was composed of hatches of various sizes. On a deep-space vessel, there could be no wasted space—not even one the size of a matchbox.

Flipping switches and adjusting settings, Amelia, Doyle, and Romilly began powering up what would be their home for—well, who knew how long? She watched TARS activate CASE, an articulated machine like himself, who made up the final member of their crew.

Doyle moved “up” to the cockpit and turned on the command console. Technically, there was no up or down at this point, but soon it would no longer be a technicality, as evinced by the ladder that led from the lower deck up to the command deck.

She watched as Doyle finished linking the on-board systems to the Ranger.

“Cooper, you should have control,” Doyle said.

“Talking fine,” Cooper replied. “Ready to spin?”

Doyle and Romilly strapped in. Amelia followed their lead and took a chair.

“All set,” she replied.

She felt nothing at first, but then the ship began to shake as Cooper fired the Ranger’s thrusters, angled perfectly to set the great wheel turning. As the spin picked up, weight began to return to Amelia’s body, pulling her feet toward the outer rim of the starship. It wasn’t gravity, exactly, but the manifestation of inertia often referred to as centrifugal force. Without it—without some semblance of weight—bad things happened to the human body over time, like bone loss and heart disease.

We’re going to need our bones and our hearts when we reach our destination , she thought.

Unfortunately, spin wasn’t a perfect substitute for gravity, because the inner ear wasn’t entirely fooled by it. It knew they were whirling around due to a little thing called the Coriolis effect.

On Earth the Coriolis effect was a big deal. It drove the climate, creating huge cells of air moving in circles—clockwise in the northern hemisphere, counter-clockwise in the southern. But the Earth was so huge, the human body didn’t notice the spin on a personal level. Yet on a whirling carnival ride it was easy to feel, often with upsetting results.

The Endurance lay somewhere in between those extremes, though leaning toward the carnival ride. Amelia felt it herself, especially when she moved toward the axis, but it didn’t really bother her.

Romilly, on the other hand, already was looking a little green.

“You okay, there?” she asked him.

“Yup.” He practically gurgled as he replied. “Just need a little time—”

“There should be a Dramamine in the hab pod,” she told him. He nodded gratefully, and moved gingerly in that direction.

“I miss you already, Amelia,” Professor Brand told his daughter, via the video link. “Be safe. Give my regards to Dr. Mann.”

“I will, Dad,” Amelia said.

“Things look good for your trajectory,” the professor continued. “We’re calculating two years to Saturn.”

“That’s a lot of Dramamine…” Romilly said. He didn’t seem to be getting along with the artificial gravity, yet Cooper hadn’t felt even a twinge of unpleasantness.

Two years, though , he thought. Murph would be twelve, and Tom seventeen. And then another two years back to Earth, so really fourteen and nineteen. Minimum. That was what he was going to miss, if their mission in the wormhole took zero time.

Which it would not.

Still, maybe it wouldn’t take all that long. In theory the trip through the wormhole would take a fraction of the time, relatively speaking. Maybe the closest planet would be the one to pan out. He might yet be home while Murph was still in her teens.

“Keep an eye on my family, sir,” Cooper told Professor Brand. “’Specially Murph. She’s a smart one.”

“We’ll be waiting when you get back,” the scientist promised. “A little older, a little wiser, but happy to see you.”

Cooper prepped the engines as Doyle ran a last series of diagnostics from the cockpit cabin of the Endurance . It was a little roomier than the one in the Ranger, set above the central cabin and reached by the rungs of a short ladder.

Brand and Romilly strapped in, and TARS and CASE likewise secured themselves with metallic clanks.

Cooper gazed down at the Earth once more, Professor Brand’s last words still fresh in his mind.

“Do not go gentle into that good night…”

He checked with Doyle, who nodded an okay. Then, without any ceremony, he fired the thrusters, and the Endurance began its journey out of Earth’s orbit, and toward the stars.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Godspeed , Endurance .”

“So alone,” Cooper said, staring at the diminishing sphere of the Earth. They had all changed into their blue sleep outfits, and had begun setting up the cryo-beds—which looked way too much like fancy coffins for his taste. Brand came to stand next to him.

“We’ve got each other,” she told him. “Dr. Mann had it worse.”

“I meant them,” he said, pointing at Earth. “Look at that perfect planet. We’re not gonna find another one like her.”

“No,” Brand agreed. “This isn’t like looking for a new condo—the human race is going to be adrift, desperate for a rock to cling to while they catch their breaths. We have to find that rock. Our three prospects are at the edge of what might sustain human life.”

She held up her tablet and tapped a blurry image of a dark blue planet. The color made it feel promising almost immediately. Blue was what Earth looked like from way out. Blue could mean water. Of course, Neptune was also blue, and it had an atmosphere of hydrogen, helium, and trace methane—completely inimical to life as they knew it.

“Laura Miller’s first,” Brand said. “She started our biology program.”

The image switched to an even smaller image, faintly red. It reminded him of early photographs of Mars.

“And Wolf Edmunds is here,” she said. And the way she said it, the way his name came off her tongue—Cooper had never heard anything like that in her voice before. As if that red dot was the center of the universe. Suddenly he was curious.

“Who’s Edmunds?” he asked.

“Wolf’s a particle physicist,” she said, and this time he knew he heard it. And the way she smiled…

Interesting…

“None of them had family?” he asked, pressing from the side rather than the back. He didn’t have Brand entirely figured yet, but he’d seen enough to guess that head-on wasn’t the right way to come at her.

“No attachments,” she replied. “My father insisted. They knew the odds against ever seeing another human being. I’m hoping we surprise at least three of them.”

“Tell me about Dr. Mann,” he said.

A new world came up on screen, white and grainy.

“Remarkable,” she said. “The best of us. My father’s protégé. He inspired eleven people to follow him on the loneliest journey in human history.” A different sort of passion flared in her eyes, and he saw some of her father there. “Scientists, explorers,” she said. “That’s what I love. Out there we face great odds. Death. But not evil.”