As Romilly had said—and as his twenty-odd years of notes had meticulously measured and elucidated—Gargantua rotated, which meant that it dragged space-time along for the ride. A slingshot was entirely plausible, but a bit more… complicated than zipping near a planet.
Cooper checked everything for the umpteenth time, hoping Romilly hadn’t gone more than a little looney while he was alone. Because Gargantua wasn’t going to grant him the slightest clemency for even the tiniest mistake.
Back in the Endurance, Amelia watched the lander come loose and shift orientation as Cooper and TARS prepared the maneuver.
Cooper’s voice came over the radio.
“Once we’ve gathered enough speed around Gargantua, we use Lander One and Ranger Two as rocket boosters to push us out of the black hole’s gravity,” he explained, as the lander reattached in the rear of the ring module, blocking her view of the Ranger and Cooper.
“The linkages between landers are destroyed,” Cooper said. “So we’ll control manually. When Lander One’s fuel is spent, TARS will detach—”
“—and get sucked into the black hole,” TARS finished.
Amelia thought they were joking at first. They did a lot of that, TARS and Cooper. Sometimes she wanted to change the humor settings on both of them. But it crept over her that this time there wasn’t any humor involved.
“Why does he have to detach?” she asked.
“We have to shed mass if we’re gonna escape that gravity,” Cooper explained.
“Newton’s third law,” TARS put in. “The only way humans have ever figured out of getting somewhere is to leave something behind.”
Doyle, Amelia thought, Romilly, Mann, her father—and now TARS? How much loss could she take?
“Cooper,” she said, feeling a little desperate, and even a little indignant. “You can’t ask TARS to do this for us—”
“He’s a robot, Amelia,” Cooper shot back. “I don’t have to ask him to do anything.”
“Cooper,” she snapped. “You asshole!”
“Sorry,” Cooper said. “You broke up a little over there.”
She was ready to launch into a full-blown tirade, but TARS interceded.
“It’s what we intended, Dr. Brand,” TARS said. “It’s our last chance to save people on Earth. If we can find some way to transmit the quantum data I’ll find in there, they might still make it.” The robot’s calm, reasonable tone checked her anger.
“If there’s someone still there to receive it,” she allowed, feeling emptier than ever.
Was it possible? Did it even make sense? It was hard to know anymore. But it was a better chance than nothing, and Cooper was probably right about shedding mass. Maddeningly, he was seldom wrong about such things.
But if there was a way to prove her father wrong, to redeem plan A, they had to take it. It just seemed so wrong that TARS had to be the one to make the sacrifice. It should be her, but it was too late for that—Cooper had seen to it, she realized. And—to be fair—neither the robots nor Cooper knew enough about the population bomb. If glitches developed, if improvisation was required, she had to be there. Seen logically, it should be TARS who did this, and not her.
But it was still hard to watch from safety as someone else paid her bills.
As the engines pushed them forward, ever faster, the ship began to shudder.
Amelia tightened her harness and tried not to revisit what would happen if Cooper was even slightly wrong in his calculations. They were so close now that all she could see was a massive Stygian ocean wreathed in golden, glowing gas. It seemed impossible they were going to escape as they fell, faster and faster, that this ancient dead god would let them slip his greedy, immortal grasp. Nothing as frail and mortal as the Endurance stood a chance in the face of such cosmic hunger. Even if they made it past perigee—their nearest approach to the black hole—they would surely break up on the way out.
But she had to believe—had to believe that Cooper could pull it off.
And, so suddenly, they were there, at the bottom of their fall. At least she hoped it was the bottom.
“Maximum velocity achieved,” CASE announced. “Prepare to fire escape thrusters.”
“Ready,” TARS said.
“Ready,” Cooper echoed.
Amelia couldn’t tear her eyes from the impossible horizon, the black-hearted monster that lay below them.
“Main engine ignition in three, two, one, mark,” CASE intoned.
The hull thrummed as the main engines fired, adding to the inertia already whipping them around Gargantua, turning the black hole’s gravity against it in a demonstration of stellar jujitsu. But the giant wasn’t giving up without a fight. Endurance strained to its limits for freedom, like a four-wheel drive trying to climb out of a sandy hole with the wheels spinning and the slope sliding backward.
Inertia wasn’t enough. Nor were the main engines.
More thrust was needed.
“Lander One,” CASE continued, “engines on my mark… three, two, one, mark—”
“Fire,” TARS said, and the lander’s engines engaged. The Endurance protested even more, her metal skeleton audibly straining as the small craft emptied it fuel reserves in one massive, maximum burn.
“Ranger Two, engines on my mark,” CASE said. “Three, two, one, mark.”
“Fire,” she heard Cooper say.
Amelia saw the stars again as they pulled away from Gargantua, toward the grand spectacle of the night sky, so much brighter than that of the solar system. And somewhere out there—outshone by nebulae and pulsars and blaze of the stellar newborn—there was the faint red dot for which they were aiming.
Edmunds’ planet.
Unbelievably, the powered slingshot seemed to be working. The tipping point was still ahead, but they were approaching it.
“That little maneuver cost us fifty-one years,” Cooper reported.
“You don’t sound bad for a hundred and twenty,” Amelia responded, a little giddy with reaction.
“Lander One, prepare to detach on my mark,” CASE said. “Three…”
She could see the lander, TARS at the controls, and her brief cheerfulness vanished as quickly as it had come. The lander’s fuel was spent, and now it was just dead weight. As was TARS.
Space required a certain parsimony of thought. Something was either useful, or it was dead weight, and if it was dead weight you dropped it. They had been shedding weight since the first stage booster detached while they were still in Earth’s atmosphere. Like TARS said, you had to leave something behind.
Was that how her father had felt about Earth, and the rest of the human race? Were they dead weight that had to be dropped, so that a handful could move on?
But TARS wasn’t dead weight.
TARS was TARS. He had a humor setting…
“Two one, mark,” CASE said.
Through the cockpit window, she saw TARS moving.
“Detach,” he said.