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.
SEVENTEEN
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.
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.