As it spun, the ghostly hand of planetary gravity took over and the great ship began dropping ponderously toward the frozen planet below.
“Oh, my God,” Brand said.
Cooper got behind the controls and took the sticks, firing the thrusters. He dove beneath the crippled starship, dodging the debris from the Ranger.
“Cooper,” CASE said, “there’s no point in using our fuel to—”
“Just analyze the Endurance’s spin,” he said, cutting CASE short.
“What are you doing?” Brand asked.
“Docking,” Cooper replied.
He pushed the thrusters, trying to match the larger ship’s rotation.
“Endurance rotation sixty-seven, sixty-eight rotations per minute,” CASE informed him.
“Get ready to match it on the retro thrusters,” Cooper said.
“It’s not possible,” CASE argued.
“No,” Cooper said, grimly. “It’s necessary.”
He noticed that the Endurance was shedding bits of itself, sending them spinning off into the void..
“Endurance is hitting atmosphere,” CASE remarked.
“She’s got no heat shield!” Brand said.
Cooper maneuvered beneath the spinning wheel, only feet from the starship. The airlock was there, and relative to the downward fall of the Endurance, the lander was more-or-less motionless.
But that wasn’t even halfway where they needed to be. The dock was whirling around at incredible speed. Speed they were going to have to match.
“CASE, you ready?” he asked.
“Ready.” CASE replied.
Cooper looked again at Endurance, and felt a blink coming on. Maybe CASE was right. They still had the lander. With it, they might manage to limp home. Probably not, but maybe. Yet if this failed, it was all over. They were all dead.
“Cooper,” CASE said, “this is no time for caution.”
Cooper felt a smile on his face.
Right.
“If I black out,” he said, “Take the stick. TARS, get ready to engage the docking mechanism. Brand—hold tight.”
“Endurance is starting to heat—” CASE said.
“Hit it!” Cooper told him.
He felt the retros fire, and the lander started to spin, picking up speed quickly as both ships streaked toward the waiting ice below. The g-forces increased, as well, pushing them against their restraints, trying to crush them. Cooper felt the blood rushing away from his head, and struggled to remain conscious.
They weren’t falling cleanly anymore. The atmosphere was pushing back, and hard, bouncing and yawing the tiny ship. Mann’s planet seemed to be everywhere, and the curve of its horizon was fast straightening out.
He saw TARS open the airlock. The Endurance was still spinning relative to them, but slowly, as they neared matching the rpm. After several heart-stopping moments they lined up, and TARS fired the grapple—but they hit an air pocket—the hatches went out of line and the grapple caught nothing.
He glanced over, saw Brand had passed out, and knew he wasn’t far behind her. He fastened his eyes on his instruments rather than the wild whirling vista of Mann’s planet that was moving into and out of view. He tried to hold on.
“Come on TARS,” he said. “Come on…”
Cooper heard the grapple fire again, and the ship suddenly lurched, violently.
“Got it!” TARS announced.
Immediately CASE reversed the direction of the thrust and their rotation began to slow.
“Gen—gentle, CASE,” Cooper muttered, half out of it.
Mann’s planet began rotating into view less frequently, just once every few seconds, until finally they were barely turning at all.
“Getting ready to pull us up,” Cooper said.
But it might already be too late. They were still falling, and Endurance was starting to burn in earnest, parts melting and sloughing off of her, becoming meteorites that streaked into the atmosphere.
Cooper eased on the main thrusters, fearful of breaking her up.
“Come on,” he said. “You can do it…”
The powerful engine began to slow their fall, but they were so close, so deep in the atmosphere…
The moments stretched, as if they were once again in the grip of the black hole—as if hours or days were dragging by, rather than just a handful of crucial seconds. Cooper felt their fall slow almost glacially, then stop.
And then—finally, painfully, they started back up out of the gravity well that was Mann’s world. The horizon dropped away behind them. Only then daring to breathe, Cooper pulled back on the sticks and allowed himself a silent moment of triumph.
Brand stirred. Cooper turned to CASE, allowing himself a real smile.
“Right.” he said. “And now for our next trick…”
“It’ll have to be good,” CASE informed him. “We’re heading into Gargantua’s pull.”
Dammit! Cooper thought. Some days there just weren’t enough doors to slam. He unbuckled his harness.
“Take her,” he told CASE.
The Endurance was a mess inside. Everything that could tear loose had done so, along with a few things that supposedly couldn’t. Without gravity, the debris swirled around crazily, kicked everywhere by jets of steam and air from as-yet unpatched ruptures in the ship’s hull and fluid circulatory systems.
CASE and TARS went to deal with the worst of those, while he and Brand took inventory of the rest of the ship.
So far as Cooper could tell, the population bomb was still intact and functional. Brand would do a more thorough analysis later. Personally, he found he hated the sight of the thing. It might mean life for the human race, but it represented the death of his children. In fact, it was more than that. The human race was more than a collection of solitary biological organisms. It was the end result of a million years of existence as a species—a million years of stories, myths, relationships, ideas both important and nonsensical, poetry, philosophy, engineering—science.
Being human was to inherit from a parent, a sibling, a family, a community, a town, a culture, a civilization. Humans hadn’t just been biological objects since before they became human.
Sure, he and Brand could bring a few thousand biologically human entities into existence with this thing, but could the two of them really substitute for the immense web of heritage, affiliation—love? Was that really saving the human race? Salvaging a single seed from a forest before it was burnt to the ground didn’t mean you had saved the forest. You could never replicate its baroque, unique ecosystem. Unfreezing human embryos was not going to “save” the human race.
The human race as he knew it was going to die. Whatever came out of this machine, it would be something different. Maybe better, maybe worse—but not the same.
CASE was flagging for his attention.
“We’re slipping towards Gargantua,” the mechanical informed him. “Shall I use the main engines?”
“No!” Cooper said, firmly. “Let her slide as long as we can.” He had been thinking about this. He couldn’t be sure of everything until he had a fine-tuned sense of their status, but he knew already that fighting Gargantua wasn’t going to get them anywhere.