“Tom,” she said. “He came back… he came back.”
Tom’s fierce expression tempered a bit toward puzzlement.
“Who?” he asked, gruffly, confusion wrestling with anger in his voice.
“Dad,” she told him. “It was him. He’s going to save us.”
Triumphantly she held up the watch—and its weirdly flickering second hand.
Murph looked at the equations she had just written, then back to the watch. She stood, gathering the pages, and hurried through the halls. In her haste she bumped into someone, and was absently aware that it was Getty, but she didn’t slow her pace.
She remembered her first time here, with her dad, how terrifying it had been, followed quickly by awe-inspiring. Now, after all these years, it was home.
She reached the launch bay, the gigantic cylindrical space station that had never been intended to fly, had been nothing more than busy work to keep everyone who knew the truth from curling up into a ball and staying that way.
She remembered the pride Professor Brand had showed in the thing, even though he believed it would never function.
She walked up to the railing, marveling at it, at the thousands of workers who were still on the job. Getty stepped up beside her, having followed, and he wore a curious look on his face.
Then she turned back to the enormous hollow, and shouted at the top of her lungs.
“Eu-RE-ka!”
She turned her grin on Getty.
“Well, it’s traditional,” she said. Then she threw her papers over the railing.
“Eureka!” she repeated, as the papers fluttered down and workers looked curiously at her.
Then she planted a kiss right on the lips of a very surprised and confused Dr. Getty.
Cooper gazed along the worldline of the watch, saw that it seemed to branch out infinitely.
“Did it work?” he asked TARS.
“I think it might have,” TARS replied.
“Why?” Cooper said, hopefully.
“Because the bulk beings are closing the tesseract,” TARS replied.
Cooper gazed again off into the distance and saw that something, at least, was happening. The lines were becoming sheets, becoming bulks, as the three-dimensional representation created for his only-human brain unraveled and returned to its full five-dimensional reality. It was like the universe was collapsing in on him, which he supposed in a sense it was.
“You don’t get it yet, TARS?” Cooper asked. “‘They’ aren’t beings—they’re us. Trying to help, just like I tried to help Murph…”
“People didn’t build this tesseract,” TARS said.
“Not yet,” Cooper replied. “But one day. Not you and I, but people—people who’ve evolved beyond the four dimensions that we know.”
As the expansion back into five dimensions came upon him, Cooper thought of Murph, and Tom—and hoped he had saved them. He thought he had, or at least played a part. There wasn’t much more that he could ask.
“What happens now?” he wondered aloud.
But then he was swept away, as if by a massive wave, like the Ranger back on Miller’s world. But that wave had only lifted and dropped him. No, this was more like a fast-moving river.
Or a riptide.
In the current, and beyond it, he saw stars and planets being born, dying, decaying into particles, then being born again, faster and faster—through space-time, above space-time, a piece of paper bending, a pen poking a hole through it…
Where was he going now? He was done, wasn’t he? He’d accomplished what he was meant to do—it was up to Murph now. And Brand.
He wondered where Brand was, how she was doing. He wished he could explain to her why he’d had to leave her alone.
Ahead he saw a glassy, golden distortion, and in it the Endurance, and for a split second he thought his wish had brought him to her—but then he saw that this Endurance was like new, undamaged, just entering the wormhole. He drifted through the bulkhead and saw Brand and Romilly there, both strapped in.
Brand, he thought, reaching toward her. In a way, he had gotten his wish. Could he communicate with her? Probably not, or at least nothing important, since this was the past, and she hadn’t known that any of this was going to happen.
To his surprise, she saw him. She reached her hand up to his, and he realized there was something he could communicate. Something that maybe was important. So he reached back, hoping to feel the warmth of her hand, give it an affectionate squeeze. But when their fingers came together they mingled, distorting each other but not really touching. A quiet moment in the chaos.
He watched her face, the wonder on it.
Then, abruptly, he was swept on. The sulfurous orb of Saturn suddenly loomed immense in his vision…
Then quiet.
THIRTY-FIVE
Cooper opened his eyes to the crack of a baseball bat, a faint breeze and gauzy sunlight. He blinked, trying to get his bearings.
He was no longer in a spacesuit. He lay in bed, tucked into crisp white sheets. The bed was in a room, and the room had a window that looked, not into space—but into light. The view was obscured by net curtains, but he could hear children laughing beyond it.
“Mr. Cooper?” someone asked. “Mr. Cooper?”
He looked up and found a young man with a pronounced chin and green eyes staring down at him. At his side was a woman with black hair in a ponytail. He didn’t know either of them, but as his brain picked up a little speed he saw that they were dressed in medical clothing—and he realized the bed was a hospital bed.
He sat up, trying to remember. He had seen Brand, and then had the stuffing knocked out of him. And Saturn…
He had been pitched back into the space around Saturn, two years from Earth and any possible rescue.
So why wasn’t he dead?
“Take it slow, sir,” the man—a doctor, he saw now—cautioned. “Remember you’re no spring chicken anymore.” He smiled. “I gather you’re—” The doctor referred to the chart in his hand. “—one hundred and twenty four years old.”
Cooper didn’t feel any older than when he’d left.
Time slippage, he thought.
“You were extremely lucky,” he continued. “The Ranger found you with only minutes left in your oxygen supply.”
Rangers? Around Saturn? Why? Had there been another expedition?
“Where am I?” he asked.
The doctor looked a little surprised, but then went to the window and pulled back the curtains.
There was no sky, only the upper curve of a huge cylinder, with upside-down houses, trees, fields, and pools. Cooper followed what he could of the curve as it continued down, realizing it went beneath him. And he knew had seen this before, or something becoming this. Back at NASA, in the mountain.
“Cooper Station,” the doctor said. “Currently orbiting Saturn.”
Cooper struggled to get up and the nurse came to his aid, helping him stand and walk slowly over to the window. Outside, beneath the topsy-turvy sky, some kids were playing baseball. As he watched, one swung like the devil and hit a pop fly. He tracked it as it flew up, slowing, pausing—then speeding up again as it crossed the station’s axis and continued on. The kids shouting warnings as the ball shattered a skylight literally on the other side of the world.
“Nice of you to name the place after me,” he said, as the ball players laughed at their faux pas.
The nurse giggled. But when he looked, he could see that it wasn’t at the ball players, and the doctor was giving her a look.
“What?” he asked.