Greg Keyes - Interstellar

From Earth, the only nebulae you could see with the naked eye were tiny dull smudges that looked like blurry stars. Here they hove up like thunderheads.

If their new home was indeed going to be here, it would have a much more interesting night sky. Probably a more interesting day sky, if it came to that.

I’m in another galaxy , he thought, trying to really grasp what had just happened. The closest star to Earth was so far away a light wave would take four years to travel between them. The nearest galaxy to Earth was two-and-a-half million light years away. Two-and-a-half million years for light to make the trip. This galaxy—this one could be anywhere .

If he had a telescope powerful enough to see home from here, he wouldn’t see his kids. Dinosaurs, maybe. Or trilobites. Or a cooling fireball. Or nothing, if he was more than five billion light years from Earth. Which he could easily be. According to Romilly, folding space a trillion light years would yield no longer a journey than folding it ten miles. But the distance after the fold—

That was real.

So to reach the planets on their itinerary, they still had to make their way through a lot of vacuum.

Far from home didn’t begin to describe how he felt in that moment.

Doyle studied his workstation. The initial maneuvering done, they were all back in the ring module, processing both their feelings and the data that was pouring in.

“The lost communications came through,” Doyle informed them.

“How?” Brand asked.

“The relay on this side cached them,” he explained, as he continued to parse through it.

“Years of basic data,” he added. “No real surprises. Miller’s site has kept pinging thumbs up, as has Mann’s… but Edmunds went down three years ago.”

“Transmitter failure?” Brand asked. Cooper heard the anxiety in her voice, and felt a little sorry for her.

“Maybe,” Doyle replied. “He was sending the thumbs up right till it went dark.”

“Miller still looks good?” Romilly asked.

As Doyle affirmed that, the astrophysicist began drawing a great big circle on a whiteboard.

“She’s coming up fast,” he said. “With one complication. The planet is much closer to Gargantua than we expected.”

“Gargantua?” Cooper said, not sure he liked the sound of it.

“A very large black hole,” Doyle explained. “Miller’s and Dr. Mann’s planets orbit it.”

Brand looked at the diagram Romilly was working on. If the big circle was the circumference of Gargantua, then the orbit he was tracing was pretty much the same.

“And Miller’s is on the horizon?” Brand said.

“A basketball around the hoop,” Romilly confirmed. “Landing there takes us dangerously close. A black hole that big has a huge gravitational pull.”

Cooper studied their grave faces, wondering why they were so concerned. It seemed easy enough for them to compensate.

“Look,” he said, “I can swing around that neutron star to decelerate—”

Brand cut him off.

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s time . That gravity will slow our clock, compared to Earth’s. Drastically.”

Cooper suddenly understood their expressions. Black holes did crazy things with time. He’d even mentioned that to Murph—but he had never believed it would actually be an issue he’d need to address.

As in many things, he had been wrong.

“How bad?” he asked, thinking that he most likely didn’t want to know.

“Every hour we spend on that planet will be maybe…” She did the mental computations. “Seven years back on Earth.”

“Jesus…” Cooper breathed.

“That’s relativity, folks,” Romilly said.

Cooper felt as if the floor had been pulled out from beneath his feet. All of a sudden Miller’s world seemed a helluva lot less hospitable.

“We can’t drop down there without considering the consequences,” he said.

“Cooper, we have a mission,” Doyle said.

“That’s easy for you to say,” Cooper returned. “You don’t have anyone back on Earth waiting for you, do you?”

“You have no idea what’s easy for me,” Doyle shot back, frowning.

Brand actually came to his aid, for once.

“Cooper’s right,” she said. “We have to think of time as a resource, just like oxygen and food. Going down there is going to cost us.”

Doyle relented, and stepped to the screen, a determined look on his face.

“Look,” he said. “Dr. Mann’s data looks promising, but we won’t get there for months. Edmunds’ is even further. Miller hasn’t sent much, but what she has sent is promising—water, organics.”

“You don’t find that every day,” Brand conceded.

“No, you do not,” Doyle agreed, his blue eyes flaring. “So think about the resources it would take to come back here…”

Yeah , Cooper granted. He’s got a point. In essence, getting from Miller’s planet to Mann’s would require climbing out of the deep gravitational well of Gargantua. It would be like swimming upstream, against the current. Which probably wouldn’t leave enough fuel for a return trip to Earth. If the choice was between getting back a little late and not getting back at all, he knew where he fell out.

“How far back from the planet would we have to stay to be out of the time shift?” Cooper asked.

Romilly pointed to his whiteboard drawing of the massive black hole and the planet skimming just above its horizon.

“Just back from the cusp,” he said.

“So we track a wider orbit of Gargantua,” Cooper said. “Parallel with Miller’s planet but a little further out… Take a Ranger down, grab Miller and her samples, debrief, and analyze back here.”

“That’ll work,” Brand said.

“No time for monkey business or chitchat down there,” Cooper emphasized. “TARS, you’d better wait up here. Who else?”

Romilly lifted his head.

“If we’re talking about a couple of years—I’d use that time to work on gravity—observations from the wormhole,” he said. “This is gold to Professor Brand.”

A couple of years , Cooper thought. He glanced at Romilly, and wondered if the man really understood what he was saying. He would be here—alone—for years . Of the four of them, Romilly had proven the least comfortable in space, the most susceptible to its physical and psychological perils.

Yet he would also be the least useful on the surface, and the most useful up here.

It felt like a huge decision to make in so little time, and not just because of Romilly.

Like Brand said, though, time was as much a resource to them as air. It wasn’t just seeing his kids again. If they lost too much time, there would be no human race to save, except for the embryos they’d brought with them. End result: no plan A.

And he was determined that there would be a plan A, come hell or high water.

“Okay,” he said. “TARS, factor an orbit of Gargantua—minimal thrusting, conserve fuel—but stay in range.”

“Don’t worry,” TARS said. “I wouldn’t leave you behind…” Abruptly he turned away from Cooper. “…Dr. Brand,” he finished, with a comic’s timing.

Cooper wondered if it might be a good idea to bring the robot’s humor setting down another notch or two.

Amelia Brand considered the black hole.

If the wormhole was a three-dimensional hole you could see through—albeit in a distorted fashion—Gargantua was a three-dimensional hole into nothing .

The average black hole had in some distant past been a star, and probably a really big one, merrily fusing hydrogen into helium, pushing enough energy out to keep its own gravity from making it collapse. But eventually, over billions of years, the hydrogen had all burned out, and it had to start using helium for fuel. And when the helium was all gone, it turned to progressively heavier and heavier elements.