Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization by Greg Keyes

the space beyond Saturn as Romilly came into the cockpit, excitement plain on his face.
    Cooper keyed the radio.
    “Strap in,” he told the others. “I’m killing the spin.”
    He began firing controlled bursts from the engines, pushing against the direction of rotation. Slowly but inexorably the motion slowed, until the Endurance was motionless—at least relative to its own axis. And as they ground to a halt, the peculiar belly-tickle of free-fall returned.
    Ahead of them, Cooper made out a distorted patch of stars, and he felt a thrill of mixed fear and wonder tremor up his spine. This was why they were here, this improbable thing.
    “There!” Romilly said energetically. “That’s the wormhole.”
    “Say it, don’t spray it, Nikolai,” Cooper responded, trying to keep things on an even keel. But Romilly’s enthusiasm was undeterred.
    “Cooper, this is a portal , cutting through space-time,” he said. “We’re seeing the heart of a galaxy so far away we don’t even know where it is in the universe.”
    Cooper stared at the thing, the astrophysicist’s words doing a slow turn in his head.
    “It’s a sphere,” he noticed.
    “Of course it is,” Romilly said. “You thought it would be just a hole?”
    Cooper suddenly felt like he was being called on to show his homework on the board—when he hadn’t done it.
    “No,” he floundered. “Well, in all the illustrations…”
    Romilly grabbed a piece of paper and drew two points on it, far from each other. He seemed delighted to have the opportunity to explain it all.
    “In the illustrations, they’re trying to show you how it works,” he said, poking a hole in one of the points with his pen. “So they say, ‘you wanna go from here to there, but it’s too far?’ A wormhole bends space like this—”
    He folded the paper so the hole overlapped with the second point, then stuck his pen through both, joining them.
    “—so you can take a shortcut across a higher dimension. But to show that, they’ve turned three-dimensional space—” He gestured around at the cockpit, then held up the paper. “—into two dimensions. Which turns the wormhole into two dimensions… a circle.”
    He looked at Cooper, expecting a response.
    “But what’s a circle in three dimensions?” he prompted.
    “A sphere,” Cooper replied, suddenly getting it.
    “Exactly,” Romilly agreed, pointing toward their destination. “It’s a spherical hole.”
    Cooper ruminated on that as the “spherical hole” loomed larger and larger.
    “And who put it there?” Romilly continued, not ready to give it a rest. “Who do we thank?”
    “I’m not thanking anyone till we get through it in one piece,” Cooper replied.
    * * *
    “Is there any trick to this?” Cooper asked Doyle, who had replaced Romilly in the cockpit. Ahead of them, he could see the quavering stars of the other galaxy, swinging in opposition to them as they moved. It was sort of like looking into a giant shaving mirror, and it was—to say the least—disorienting.
    He fired the thrusters, easing their momentum toward the thing.
    “No one knows,” Doyle said.
    That didn’t sound very reassuring.
    “But the others made it, right?” he asked.
    “At least some of them,” Doyle replied.
    Right , he thought. Some of them. He hadn’t thought to ask how many of the Lazarus pilots hadn’t sent back any signals at all, had just gone quiet after passing through the wormhole. And if it had been mentioned in one of the briefings, he must have missed it.
    Or blanked it out.
    “Thanks for the confidence boost,” Cooper said.
    He took a deep breath, then, and let it out slowly.
    “Everybody ready to say goodbye to the solar system?” he asked. “To our galaxy?”
    Everyone seemed to understand that it was a rhetorical question, because no one answered. So without further comment, Cooper pushed the stick forward, nosing toward the anomaly and letting gravity have them, draw them toward the center of the