Then she switched off the camera.
Again, Cooper stared at the empty screen.
Happy birthday, Murph, he thought, stunned.
What have I done?
TWENTY-ONE
“I didn’t mean to intrude,” a voice said softly, as Murph wiped her tears. She turned and found Professor Brand there. She hadn’t heard his wheelchair approach.
“I’ve never seen you in here before,” he said.
Murph stood up.
“I’ve never been in here before,” she said. Without really thinking, she took the handles on the back of the wheelchair and began to conduct him into the corridor.
She’d thought he would never surrender to the chair—he’d tried to make do with canes and crutches at first, which led to more falls, one of them life-threatening. At some point she had managed to make him see that he could do what was really important to him sitting down, as well as standing—probably better.
“I talk to Amelia all of the time,” the professor said. “It helps. I’m glad you’ve started.”
“I haven’t,” Murph replied. “I just had something I wanted to get out.”
If he’d asked her, she might have gone further, but she might not have. And he didn’t ask—she knew he wouldn’t. Professor Brand had been part of her life for a long time. He’d pulled her out of school, brought her here to be educated, taken her under his wing. Given her something real to do.
Her father had been around for ten years of her life. The professor had been an everyday part of her existence for almost three times that long. She loved him, in a way, and he would probably say the same thing about her. But he respected the hard, secret core of her. He never tried to push into the thoughts and feelings onto which she put the strongest guards, and she in turn respected his silences, as well.
He spoke of Amelia often enough that Murph almost felt she knew her, even though they had only met the once, long ago. But as often as the professor brought her up, there was something he never admitted. Something Murph knew intuitively.
He believed he would never see his daughter again.
With that, she could empathize. It was a bond that held them together, this unspoken fear.
They reached the professor’s office a few moments later. He wheeled himself behind his desk.
“I know they’re still out there,” he said.
“I know,” Murph replied. She wasn’t so sure herself, but the professor needed her encouragement.
“There are so many reasons their communications might not be getting through.”
“I know, Professor,” she said.
“I’m not sure which I’m more afraid of,” he went on. “They never come back, or they come back to find we’ve failed.”
“Then let’s succeed,” Murph said.
He’s looking old, she thought. Weary. And—something else. Something she couldn’t place.
The professor pressed his lips together and nodded. He pointed at the formula that filled much of his office.
“So,” he began, “back from the fourth iteration, let’s run it with a finite set.”
Murph paused as she picked up her notebook.
Really?
“With respect, Professor,” she said, “we’ve tried that a hundred times.”
“And it only has to work once, Murph,” he replied.
She shrugged, and reluctantly began following his instructions.
Later, they sat on a walkway eating sandwiches and watching the continuing construction on the big ship. As his eyes wandered over the gigantic cylinder, she saw the pride on Professor Brand’s face, and it felt like old times, like when he’d first brought her here after her father left. When she’d first begun to learn about the mission, and to believe. To understand the purpose of her life.
“Every rivet they drive in could have been a bullet,” he said. “We’ve done well for the world, here. Whether or not we crack the equation before I kick—”
“Don’t be morbid, Professor,” Murph chided. She did it lightly, but the fact was that the professor’s death was something she really didn’t want to think about. Almost everyone important to her was dead, or might as well be. There were only Professor Brand and Tom, and she and Tom—well, there was something broken there.
“I’m not afraid of death, Murph,” the professor told her. “I’m an old physicist. I’m afraid of time.”
That tickled something in the back of her brain, but it wasn’t until after lunch, when they were back in his office, that it went from tickle to scratch, then to an epiphanic whack on the head.
“Time,” she said. “You’re afraid of time…”
She was sure, now.
“Professor,” she said, “the equation…?”
He looked up from his work. She took a deep breath, and plunged on.
“For years we’ve tried to solve it without changing the underlying assumptions about time,” she said.
“And?” he replied mildly.
“And that means each iteration becomes an attempt to prove its own proof. It’s recursive. Nonsensical—”
“Are you calling my life’s work ‘nonsense,’ Murph?” he snapped irritably.
“No,” she replied, feeling unaccountably a little angry herself. “I’m saying you’ve been trying to solve it with one arm—no, with both arms tied behind your back.”
She suddenly felt, not uncertain but… wary.
“And I don’t understand why,” she finished.
Professor Brand gazed at the floor, then started wheeling his chair away.
“I’m an old man, Murph,” he said. “Could we pick this up another time? I’d like to talk to my daughter.”
She nodded, watching him go, wondering what the hell was going on.
Amelia Brand watched her father age before her eyes. He talked about the mission, asked how she was, made note of minor aches and pains, and filled her in on the people she might remember. Someone named Getty had become a medical doctor. At first she didn’t know who he meant, because the Gettys she remembered had both been cyberneticists—until she remembered that they’d had a son, ten or twelve years old when she left.
She had been his babysitter, once or twice.
He told her that he had a bright new assistant: Cooper’s daughter. The girl, Murph, was working with him on the gravity equation, and he seemed confident that they nearly had it solved.
As the years passed, he continued to be optimistic. She kept hoping that in the next message he would declare “Eureka!” but in the course of messages that spanned more than two decades, it never happened. Still, plan A was proceeding apace, he assured her. The first of the huge ship-stations was nearing completion, awaiting only something to lift it free of the tyranny of planetary gravity.
He never said anything about it, but at some point she realized he was in a wheelchair, and it was probably permanent. And yet, even as frail as he appeared, she could still hear the passion in his voice, see it in his eyes. He had not bowed to time, and he didn’t expect anyone else to do so.
“Stepping out into the universe,” he told her toward the end, eyes watery but alert, “we must first confront the reality that nothing in our solar system can help us. Then we must confront the realities of interstellar travel. We must venture far beyond the reach of our own life spans, must think not as individuals, but as a species…”
TWENTY-TWO
Cooper nodded as Brand joined them. It was time to decide what to do next, to stop licking their wounds and move on.