Greg Keyes - Interstellar

Ahead of them, Cooper made out a distorted patch of stars, and he felt a thrill of mixed fear and wonder tremor up his spine. This was why they were here, this improbable thing.

“There!” Romilly said energetically. “That’s the wormhole.”

“Say it, don’t spray it, Nikolai,” Cooper responded, trying to keep things on an even keel. But Romilly’s enthusiasm was undeterred.

“Cooper, this is a portal , cutting through space-time,” he said. “We’re seeing the heart of a galaxy so far away we don’t even know where it is in the universe.”

Cooper stared at the thing, the astrophysicist’s words doing a slow turn in his head.

“It’s a sphere,” he noticed.

“Of course it is,” Romilly said. “You thought it would be just a hole?”

Cooper suddenly felt like he was being called on to show his homework on the board—when he hadn’t done it.

“No,” he floundered. “Well, in all the illustrations…”

Romilly grabbed a piece of paper and drew two points on it, far from each other. He seemed delighted to have the opportunity to explain it all.

“In the illustrations, they’re trying to show you how it works,” he said, poking a hole in one of the points with his pen. “So they say, ‘you wanna go from here to there, but it’s too far?’ A wormhole bends space like this—”

He folded the paper so the hole overlapped with the second point, then stuck his pen through both, joining them.

“—so you can take a shortcut across a higher dimension. But to show that, they’ve turned three-dimensional space—” He gestured around at the cockpit, then held up the paper. “—into two dimensions. Which turns the wormhole into two dimensions… a circle.”

He looked at Cooper, expecting a response.

“But what’s a circle in three dimensions?” he prompted.

“A sphere,” Cooper replied, suddenly getting it.

“Exactly,” Romilly agreed, pointing toward their destination. “It’s a spherical hole.”

Cooper ruminated on that as the “spherical hole” loomed larger and larger.

“And who put it there?” Romilly continued, not ready to give it a rest. “Who do we thank?”

“I’m not thanking anyone till we get through it in one piece,” Cooper replied.

“Is there any trick to this?” Cooper asked Doyle, who had replaced Romilly in the cockpit. Ahead of them, he could see the quavering stars of the other galaxy, swinging in opposition to them as they moved. It was sort of like looking into a giant shaving mirror, and it was—to say the least—disorienting.

He fired the thrusters, easing their momentum toward the thing.

“No one knows,” Doyle said.

That didn’t sound very reassuring.

“But the others made it, right?” he asked.

“At least some of them,” Doyle replied.

Right , he thought. Some of them. He hadn’t thought to ask how many of the Lazarus pilots hadn’t sent back any signals at all, had just gone quiet after passing through the wormhole. And if it had been mentioned in one of the briefings, he must have missed it.

Or blanked it out.

“Thanks for the confidence boost,” Cooper said.

He took a deep breath, then, and let it out slowly.

“Everybody ready to say goodbye to the solar system?” he asked. “To our galaxy?”

Everyone seemed to understand that it was a rhetorical question, because no one answered. So without further comment, Cooper pushed the stick forward, nosing toward the anomaly and letting gravity have them, draw them toward the center of the wormhole.

Cooper realized he was holding his breath, waiting for some sort of impact, but of course there was nothing there to hit. Instead they simply crossed into it, and suddenly the Endurance was part of the distortion, its warped reflection coming towards them, passing through itself.

And the universe turned inside out.

Distorted images of space-time seemed to run off in every direction, Romilly’s paper bending not in three dimensions but in five, and it was happening at an ever-increasing speed, so everything was rushing by, accelerating at a dizzying pace. For the moment the Endurance seemed to be withstanding the elemental forces that lay beyond the hull. Cooper hoped it would stay that way.

He tried to grasp what it was his eyes were reporting. His brain told him they were racing along a sort of wall, a wall of stars and galaxies and nebulae streaking past at immense speeds. But if he shifted his gaze, it seemed more like a tunnel, albeit one that billowed out in the distance. He thought he could see an end to it, and yet that end didn’t seem to be getting any closer, as if it was withdrawing from them even more quickly than they rocketed toward it.

It was the most incredible thing Cooper had ever experienced, and like nothing he ever had or could have imagined. He wasn’t even sure he was going to be able to describe it later. But for now…

He looked down at his instruments. They were inert.

There was nothing there.

“They won’t help you in here,” Doyle said. “We’re cutting through the bulk, the space beyond our three dimensions.” He checked his own instruments. “All we can do is record and observe,” he concluded.

Back in the ring module Brand saw a sudden apparent ripple in the air itself, which swiftly multiplied into an undulating distortion inside the ship.

Bending toward her.

Moving.

“What is that?” Romilly gasped.

It was something of a relief to know that he saw it too.

She watched the distortion come, fascinated. It didn’t even occur to her to move. There was form there.

“I think…” she murmured, “I think it’s them .”

“Distorting space-time?” Romilly said.

Brand reached toward it.

“Don’t!” Romilly warned, as it touched her, and her hand began to ripple; like the air, like the wormhole. But she felt nothing, no pain.

Nothing but delight.

In the Ranger, Cooper saw they were at last reaching the light at the end of the tunnel. Yet it wasn’t one light, but many : star clusters and nebulae, galaxies and pulsars all getting closer and larger very quickly, much too quickly, impossibly fast…

And then they were out, the illusion of three dimensions snapping back into being, the rest of it folding away into the magical secret doors of the universe. It was sort of like watching a real person suddenly become a flat snapshot on paper. The image was recognizable, but depth and time—and the motion that time made possible—were all missing.

Only he didn’t have the words for what was missing now, or even the concepts that the words might identify.

On the console, the instruments suddenly came back to life now that there was something for them to sense—something to which they could react.

Cooper brought his eyes up again, and stared, awestruck to his core.

“We’re—here,” Doyle said.

Brand’s fingers were back to normal. The distortion was gone. But she kept staring at them.

“What was that?” Romilly asked her.

She touched her hand, remembering the presence, the sentience she had felt, out of phase, in different dimensions, but sharing the same space.

“The first handshake,” she replied.

Earth’s sun was nowhere near the center of its galaxy, but was in a hinterland nearer the edge of it, where the stars were thin and distant from one another—a lonely house on a great plain.

Certainly not a condo in the city.

This place, this sky beyond the wormhole, this was more like New York. Or Chicago, at least. Stars blazed everywhere, some brightly enough to leave impressions on Cooper’s retinas. Gauzy nebulae draped between and among them, coloring whole quadrants of space with light refracted through gas and dust and the fresh brilliance of newly born stars.