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“And he’s there on the ground, sending us an unambiguous message that we should go to that planet,” Cooper said.

Brand’s lips thinned, but she didn’t say anything.

Romilly looked back and forth between them. He looked a little uncomfortable, perhaps sensing there was something going on beneath the surface of the conversation—something to which he was not privy.

“Should we vote?” Romilly asked.

Cooper didn’t feel good about what he was about to do. But now wasn’t really the time to worry about anyone’s feelings.

“If we’re going to vote,” he said to Romilly, “there’s something you need to know.” He paused. “Brand?”

She didn’t take the bait, but remained silent.

“He has a right to know,” Cooper insisted.

“That has nothing to do with it,” she said.

“What does?” Romilly asked.

Cooper left her a pause, but when she didn’t fill it, he did.

“She’s in love with Wolf Edmunds,” Cooper told him.

Romilly’s brow went up.

“Is that true?” he asked.

Brand looked stricken.

“Yes,” she admitted. “And that makes me want to follow my heart. But maybe we’ve spent too long trying to figure all this with theory—”

“You’re a scientist, Brand—” Cooper cut in.

“I am,” she said. “So listen to me when I tell you that love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful. Why shouldn’t it mean something?”

“It means social utility,” Cooper said. “Child rearing, social bonding—”

“We love people who’ve died,” Brand objected. “Where’s the social utility in that? Maybe it means more—something we can’t understand yet. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of higher dimensions that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen for a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.

“Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t yet understand it.” She sent a pleading look to Romilly, but he couldn’t meet her eyes. Cooper could guess what he was thinking—that Brand had probably lost it.

Or at least some of “it.”

She saw it, too, and so she brought her appeal back to him.

“Cooper, yes,” Brand conceded, wearily. “The tiniest possibility of seeing Wolf again excites me. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

Cooper had a sudden sense of déjà vu, and remembered his conversation with Donald on the porch.

“I’m not gonna lie to you, Donald,” he’d said. “Heading out there is what I feel born to do, and it excites me. That doesn’t make it wrong.”

“Honestly, Amelia,” Cooper said gently, “it might.”

Brand seemed to wilt. She knew she had lost. He felt for her, but he had to do what made sense. What got this done most quickly and certainly.

“Tars,” he said, “set course for Dr. Mann.”

Before she turned away, Cooper saw the tears start in Brand’s eyes.

* * *

After they were out of orbit and on their new trajectory, he found her. She was checking on the population bomb.

“Brand, I’m sorry,” he said.

“Why?” she asked, but her voice was tight. “You’re just being objective—unless you’re punishing me for screwing up on Miller’s planet.”

“This wasn’t a personal decision for me,” he said.

She turned from the metal and glass contraption and looked him straight in the eye. He felt her hurt and anger like a heat lamp on his face. It was surprising, in a way, to see her usual detachment so thoroughly compromised.

“Well, if you’re wrong, you’ll have a very personal decision to make,” she told him, a good fraction of acid in her tone. “Your fuel calculations are based on a return journey. Strike out on Dr. Mann’s planet, and we’ll have to decide whether to return home, or push on to Edmunds’ planet with plan B. Starting a colony could save us from extinction.”

She closed the panel.

“You might have to decide between seeing your children again… and the future of the human race.” She smiled, but there was nothing happy or friendly about it.

“I trust you’ll be as objective then,” she finished.

* * *

Murph stood with Tom, watching the field burn. Or, rather, the corn. Because Murph suddenly saw that each plant was its own fire—an incandescent stalk giving itself, spark by spark, to the dark black boil above the light, driving the smoke pointlessly toward the heavens. For a moment she comprehended each of them as filaments in a bulb, flames in a lantern, superheated rods of metal, an alien forest on a distant world. Each plant the maker and center of its own immolation, each burning alone. To say the field was burning was to miss what was really happening. A field was an abstraction. A single plant was not.

It was a life, being sacrificed so that others might survive.

Then the stalks came apart like paper, the updraft shredding some into rising shards, others slumping and crumbling into glowing piles; then that illusion faded, too. Soon there would be no corn, no field. Only carbon and dust, inseparable in their lifelessness.