Every assumption they made here was a disaster in the making.
She didn’t know how Mann’s world had deceived them this time, but she hoped desperately that CASE knew what he was doing, where he was going, because Cooper couldn’t have much time left.
In Mann’s pod, Romilly was still trying to comprehend what he was seeing, and not really getting anywhere. He felt a renewed sense of the frustration he’d felt on the Endurance; years alone with the data, talking to himself, on the verge of going crazy—and occasionally maybe veering over that verge.
He remembered what Mann had said about leaving KIPP’s archives intact, the tacit implication being that he didn’t need to bother with them at all. But this… this was intolerable. Why would Mann warn him off, anyway? Had he stored personal data? Had KIPP witnessed and recorded him acting a little crazy? Romilly could understand that. He’d been there himself. But the fact was, there were some fundamental contradictions here that only a scan of the archives could clear up.
Mann would probably never know, and if he did—well, it was far easier to get forgiveness than permission.
“This data makes no sense,” he said to TARS. “Access the archive.”
This is good enough, Murph figured.
She hopped out of the truck, lifted the gas can from the back, and started dousing the cornstalks. She remembered wandering in the fields when she was little, being thoroughly enveloped by them, like being in her own secret maze. She had liked corn, then—the grassy smell of the leaves, the yellow pollen when it tasseled, the ears that appeared almost magically beneath those tufts, swelling daily. The sweet taste of it when it was green, in the milk, before it began to harden into grain.
That had been a real luxury, green corn—a waste of the corn’s full potential to feed humanity’s masses, but an awesome treat for a kid. To her, it would always be the taste of summer, and of her youth. The idea of burning the corn seemed wrong to the point of being sacrilegious.
She was still thinking that when she set it aflame.
Cooper rolled ungracefully onto his back, his eyes fixed skyward, but not seeing anything there.
Do you see your children yet?
He did. He saw Tom, grinning, driving the truck for the first time—and younger, laughing as Donald swung him around in a circle out in front of the house, when there had still been a few scraps of lawn. Before the dust took over. Tom, holding the swaddled figure of Jesse, the grandchild he would never know—could never know, because the boy was years dead before Cooper had even known he existed.
And he saw Murph, a tiny, wrinkled thing in her mother’s arms, a single curl of red hair on her otherwise bald pate. Murph, in the truck, pretending it was an Apollo lander, that the stick was the attitude or thrust controller, depending on what it needed to be at any point in her pretend flight.
Murph later, shifting the gears so he could drink his coffee.
And Murph in her bedroom, looking at the watch he had given her. He saw her throw it away, saw her tear-stained face.
Murph, he thought, as everything blurred. I’m sorry.
Murph gazed at the fire leaping through the corn, stalk to stalk, a living creature, gleeful in its life, as hungry as any new-born thing. Her disgust at what she had done was fading fast—it was the corn that was keeping Tom here, killing little Coop. If burning the corn—if giving the fire life—meant a new life for Coop and Lois, then it was well worth it. Tom would see the smoke. He would come. She didn’t want to be here then.
She climbed back into the truck and headed out.
He would figure out who did it, soon enough. By then she would be long gone, and Lois and Coop along with her.
Brand watched as the cloudscape jetted by, as below them a huge plain opened up uninterrupted and white—except for what appeared to a be a tiny, broken doll lying near the edge of it, next to a deep blue hole.
“I see him,” she told CASE.
Cooper felt rather a hard thud on the ice, and at first thought it was nothing—just the last, random sensation of his dying body. But then he forced his eyes open and, through the wind-whipped ice and his own frozen tears, he saw it. The lander, and someone leaping out of it, elbow-thrusters firing.
Mann’s come back to finish me off, he thought, trying to summon the energy to crawl again. It was no use—his arms and legs might as well have been made of lead.
Then a moment later someone yanked his useless helmet off and he saw Brand’s face through her own glass visor. She shoved something over his nose, and he was suddenly sucking in air—sweet, stale, canned air. That was all he wanted to do, breathe. She had to know.
TARS didn’t seem to be having any luck with KIPP. He turned to Romilly.
“It needs a person to unlock its archival function,” the robot informed him. He shifted a bit so Romilly could reach the data screen and start the procedure. Then he heard a voice—tiny, far off, shouting at him. He looked over and realized it was his helmet.
As he reached for it, KIPP stirred to life.
Romilly lifted the helmet, and the voice grew clearer. Identifiable.
“Brand?” he said. He was struck by how urgent she sounded.
But Romilly never heard the rest.
TWENTY-NINE
Mann struggled across the ice, trying to get his story straight in his mind. He would have to lose his own long-range transmitter, claim Cooper had accidently disengaged it in the fall when Mann had tried to save him.
Should’ve dropped it down the hole, he realized, but he wasn’t going back there now.
He felt the shudder in the ice first, and then the sound and shock blew through him, frozen particles streaking past on the front of the concussion. At first he thought there had been some random shifting in the frozen masses and the ice had broken, but then he saw the black smoke churning from a nearby hilltop.
His hilltop. Where he’d lain so long in exile.
Where KIPP was.
He felt a fresh surge of terror. This was all spinning out of control.
“Dammit, Romilly,” he muttered. He’d warned him, hadn’t he? It wasn’t his fault.
He switched his radio back on. Brand’s voice greeted him.
“Come on, Cooper,” she was saying. “Just a couple more steps…”
Well that tears it, he thought. He had known he would have to deal with Cooper, but he’d hoped to have the others as companions in the mission. Desperately hoped. He didn’t want to be alone again. That was what had broken him, the solitude. If there was any thought that was intolerable, it was to be alone again.
But now he had no choice. There could be no mending this with Cooper. Romilly was certainly dead, and they would blame that on him, too.
Brand…
Still, he could hold onto the fact that this time it wouldn’t be forever. There was still Edmunds’ world, and plan B. He wouldn’t be alone for the rest of his life. Wolf might still be alive, and there was no need for him to know anything about this… unpleasantness. And whether he survived or not, there would be the children. He could take the isolation again, as long as he knew there would be an end to it.