So was Cooper’s.
“Best odds I’ve had in years,” Mann told him, and then he butted his head into Cooper’s glass. Cooper heard it crack, felt the cold first, and then the acrid, nose-scorching scent of ammonia.
Horrified, he rolled away, trying to cover the crack with his glove, only then realizing how big it was.
As he lay there, he was vaguely aware that Mann was bending over him. He felt the burn in his throat now, and his windpipe tried to close, to keep the poisonous atmosphere out of his lungs.
“Please don’t judge me, Cooper,” Mann said. “You were never tested like I was. Few men have been…”
Murph’s throat was tight as she drove away from the farmhouse and back toward NASA.
“You did your best, Murph,” Getty said. He sounded as if he meant it, and she was amazed he could summon that much empathy while nursing his own bleeding nose.
But it wasn’t how she felt. She hadn’t done her best. She’d been glad to be quit of the farm and corn and all of it—as glad as Dad had ever been—to just leave Grandpa and Tom to deal with it. And the result was a chasm between her and her brother, a chasm miles wide and deep and completely invisible to her, until now. Tom was the guy who stayed and did what everyone told him he was supposed to do, working hard at the soil, watching his crops die, watching his children die.
She had followed their absentee father off to save the world in an air-conditioned cave. She had abandoned Tom, too.
Small wonder if he resented her.
But it was Lois and little Coop that would pay the price for what she had done. It was a price they should not have been forced to pay.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Cooper crawled, half blind, across the ice. His face was numb, but his lungs felt like they were on fire. He knew if it wasn’t for the positive pressure from his oxygen supply, he would probably already be unconscious. As it was, the toxic air of Mann’s world was at least slightly diluted.
That wouldn’t help him for long, though. The first black wave of panic was over, replaced by…
“You’re feeling it, aren’t you?” Mann said. “That survival instinct—that’s what drove me. It’s always driven the human race, and it’s going to save it now. I’m going to save it. For all mankind. For you, Cooper.”
Mann got up and began walking away.
“I’m sorry,” he said over his shoulder. “I can’t watch you go through this—I thought I could. But I’m still here. I’m here for you.”
“I’m here for you.” It was the most terrifying thing Mann had said. He’s really doing this, Cooper thought. Mann is really going to let me die. And he thinks he’s being nice about it.
“Cooper,” Mann continued, “when you left, did Professor Brand read you the poem? How does it end?”
Cooper saw him climb back up onto the shelf, and knew he would never have the strength to do the same thing. Even if he did…
“Do not go gentle into that good night,” Mann said.
Cooper remembered of course—the professor’s comforting voice, wishing them farewell as they slipped the shackles of Earth and headed out toward Saturn, the wormhole, the stars beyond. His words had been a guide, a path to follow, a message of hope.
On Mann’s lips they were a eulogy.
More bullshit to make him feel clean about murder.
People had always called Cooper stubborn, but he had always thought of himself more as realistic, and perhaps a bit—persistent. Just now he felt something harden in him and compress, like coal being squeezed into a diamond.
He knew, intellectually, that he was going to die someday. He wasn’t exactly okay with it, but facts were facts. One day, he would, in fact, go into that “good night.” But not today, quietly or any other way. And not by Mann’s hands.
No way.
Wasn’t going to happen.
His mind boiled away everything but what he needed to know, what he needed to see—and then he saw it, just a few feet away.
The long-range transmitter.
Summoning everything he had, he began crawling toward it, even as black spots began to dance before his eyes and his chest felt as if it were going to explode.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Mann looked back down at Cooper, his tortured coughing and choking as clear in his ears as if he were right there. He had wondered if he would feel regret. He supposed it was still too early to tell. Cooper was still trying, still struggling, still somehow hoping to survive. It was the most magnificent thing he had ever witnessed. He wished the pilot could somehow understand why it was necessary.
He turned away and used his jets to return to the higher ground, and then looked back once more at the feebly thrashing figure.
“Cooper,” he said. “Do you see your children yet?”
The only answer was more hacking, and it was all suddenly too much for Mann. It must be so lonely to die, even when someone was with you.
A wave of unanticipated terror swept through him, and he turned off the radio, unable to even listen anymore. Cooper was still moving, a small figure, but at least now he was silent.
Mann put his back to it, and went to do what he must.
Cooper grasped the transmitter, but his gloves might as well have been mittens as he struggled to reconnect it. He tried to slow down, to get it right, but everything was fading, and if he didn’t do it soon, it wouldn’t get done at all.
But he couldn’t do it. Not with the gloves on.
So he pulled them off. He felt the cold again—it struck through his hands and up his arms, encircling his heart, but he could feel; for a few seconds the sensation was energizing. But then everything was shaking, and his fingers wouldn’t stay still…
Then the transmitter clicked into place.
“Brand!” he rasped out. “Brand! Help me! Help…”
And elsewhere, on a dusty plain, Murph knew what she had to do. She wheeled the truck around and floored it.
Brand leapt into the cockpit, Cooper’s fading voice still ringing in her ears. What had happened? Cooper sounded like he was asphyxiating, and she hadn’t heard anything at all from Mann. Was the scientist dead already?
“I have a fix,” CASE said, as the engines cut in.
“Cooper?” she said. “Cooper, we’re coming.”
“No air,” he wheezed. “Ammonia.”
“Don’t talk,” she said. Breathe as little as possible—we’re coming.”
Murph pulled off the road and blew into one of Tom’s cornfields, cutting through it as Getty sat wide-eyed and white-knuckled in the passenger seat. As she watched the corn part around the bumper, she remembered that long-ago day when they had chased the Indian drone, the three of them—Dad, Tom, and her.
The last time they had done anything together. Tom driving, her keeping the antenna fixed, Dad cracking the encryption. They’d been a team, a family.
Only a day later, all of that had been blown to hell. And now, Tom thought she was the enemy.
Well—she was about to be.
Brand tried to keep steady as CASE wove somewhat more than recklessly through the ice formations, avoiding collision sometimes by no more than inches.
It was the same sick feeling in her belly as the one she’d felt when she saw the wave bearing down on them on Miller’s world—the realization that not only was everything they knew not enough, but sometimes it actively hurt them. All of her instincts had told her that a few inches of water was harmless, and that big fluffy clouds were nothing to worry about.