Suddenly his perspective shifted, and dizzyingly. What if the structures actually were buildings? Houses, schools, other facilities. At the very thought, their purposes became clear. And yet, they were built along the curve, horizontal to the ground, useless…
On Earth, he thought. They’d be useless here on Earth. With a planetary gravity. But in space, with the vast cylinder spinning along its axis, “down” would be relative. The entire inner surface of the cylinder would become the ground on which folks would walk.
“This whole facility,” he began, still not quite believing what he was saying, “it’s a vehicle? A space station?”
“Both,” Professor Brand said. “We’ve been working on it—and others like it—for twenty-five years. Plan A.”
Cooper ran his gaze around the inside-out world that was still a work in progress. He’d seen designs for things like this, but they were meant to be built in space, not beneath the surface of a planet.
“How does it get off the Earth?” he asked. It seemed undoable. Even if there were thrusters powerful enough to push it into orbit, the entire structure would break up under the acceleration. No object so large could handle the force necessary to escape Earth’s pull.
“Those first gravitational anomalies changed everything,” Professor Brand explained. “Suddenly we knew that harnessing gravity was real. So I started working on the theory—and we started building this station.”
Cooper heard something in the professor’s tone.
“But you haven’t solved it yet,” he guessed, and the older man nodded grimly.
“That’s why there’s a plan B,” Dr. Brand said, her dark eyes studying him. Weighing him up, maybe? Trying to decide if he was worthy?
She motioned, and led Cooper to a nearby lab full of devices built for purposes he couldn’t even guess. They came to a stop in front of a vault made of glass and steel. It housed a series of movable shelves fronted by circular white seals. Dr. Brand grasped a handle on one and turned. The seal opened and she pulled out a cylindrical steel unit housing a multitude of glass vials.
Condensation sighed out from the now empty cavity, like a breath on a cold day.
“The problem is gravity,” she said. “How to get a viable amount of human life off this planet. This is one way. Plan B—a population bomb. Almost five thousand fertilized eggs, preserved in containers weighing in at under nine hundred kilos.”
Five thousand children, he thought. Five thousand, in this little vault, waiting to be brought into the world.
“How could you raise them?” Cooper asked.
“With equipment on board, we incubate the first ten,” Brand replied, as if she was talking about planting corn. “After that, with surrogacy, the growth becomes exponential. Within thirty years, we might have a colony of hundreds. The real difficulty of colonization is genetic diversity.” She pointed to the glass vials enclosed by the device. “This takes care of that.”
Cooper looked at the thing, an uncomfortable feeling growing in the back of his mind. Genetic diversity, sure—five thousand fertilized eggs could be selected to represent the entire range of human variation. Efficient, maybe, but it was clinical, cold. And it presented one huge problem.
“So we just give up on people here?” he asked.
“That’s why plan A’s a lot more fun,” Dr. Brand said.
Cooper thought about the huge Earthbound station. How much had it cost? What a massive gamble—every dime spent here was a dime not being spent trying to beat the blight, to feed the people of the planet. Was the professor really that sure he could pull this out of his hat? He seemed to have convinced all of the right people that he could.
Maybe the professor is right, he mused. He knows a helluva lot more than I do about the big picture. Maybe whoever was studying the blight had decided it couldn’t be fought—that, as Professor Brand said, it was just a matter of time. Maybe they were spending resources on this project because, no matter how far-fetched the whole thing seemed, it was the only hope humanity had.
A lot of really smart people had to have bought into the idea.
Of course, even smart people can be wrong.
Still, it was all better than what he had feared at first. They hadn’t turned back to weapons, thank God, and war. He hadn’t stumbled onto a plan to take what little was left and hoard it away. They weren’t trying to squeeze the last remaining drops of life from the dirt.
No, instead of looking down, they were looking up.
They had turned back to the stars.
Later, Professor Brand showed him the equations. Cooper had had plenty of math back in the day, but it had been more applied than theoretical, so this was all way beyond him. The equations covered more than a dozen blackboards in the professor’s office, complete with diagrams, and while he could pick out parts of it, the rest might as well have been written in cuneiform, as far as he was concerned.
“Where have you got to?” Cooper asked.
“Almost there,” Professor Brand assured him.
“Almost? You’re asking me to hang everything on ‘almost?’”
The professor stepped a little closer.
“I’m asking you to trust me,” he said. Professor Brand’s eyes were burning with what seemed like a limitless passion, and Cooper realized that the old man had thrown all of himself into this. He believed—really believed—that it could be done. Cooper had seen glimpses of this fervor before, back in the day, but he had never understood what lay behind it.
Now he did. The survival of the human race.
“All those years of training,” he said. “You never told me.”
“We can’t always be open about everything, Coop, even if we want to be.” The professor paused, and then he said, “What can you tell your children about this mission?”
That was a tender point, one he had already been considering. What would he tell Tom and Murph? That the world was ending? That he was going off into space to try and save it? And if he had known all those years ago he was training for such a mission, how would he have reacted?
There was no way to know. So much time had passed, so much had occurred, he barely knew the young man he had once been.
“Find us a new home,” the professor said. “When you return, I’ll have solved the problem of gravity. You have my word.”
TWELVE
The truck had barely rolled to a stop before Murph swung the door open and dashed for the house. On the porch, Donald watched her whiz past, then shot his son-in-law a questioning look.
Cooper simply shook his head and followed Murph inside and up the stairs. He heard a dragging sound coming from her room.
When he tried to open her door, it only cracked a little—from what he could tell, she had stacked a desk and a chair against it.
“Murph?” he attempted.
“Go!” she shouted. “If you’re leaving, just go!”
Donald listened in his usual way, without many interruptions or much expression, just taking it in as it came. It was a little cool on the porch, but Cooper preferred to be out beneath the night sky, rather than in the house.
After a time, he’d given Donald the full story of what had happened to him and Murph. He sat back to see how the old man would react.