Gateway Chapter 2: Food Mines, Dead Fathers, and a Lottery Ticket Out
Chapter 2 takes us back. Way back. Before the money, before Gateway, before the guilt. This is where we learn where Rob came from. And it is not pretty.
The Fair That Changed Everything
Rob was about six years old when his parents took him to a fair in Cheyenne. Hot dogs, soya popcorn, hydrogen balloons, circus dogs. Normal kid stuff. But inside a pressure tent, for one dollar admission, someone had set up a display of Heechee artifacts from the tunnels on Venus.
Prayer fans. Fire pearls. Real Heechee-metal mirrors for twenty-five dollars each. Rob’s father said they were not real. But to Rob, they were absolutely real. They could not afford one anyway.
This is also when Gateway was first discovered. On the bus ride home, Rob heard his father talking about it in that quiet, wishing voice people use when they talk about lives they will never live. His father wanted to go. He wanted to be a prospector.
He never got the chance. He was dead a year later.
Life in the Food Mines
Here is where Pohl’s world-building gets dark. In Rob’s future, Earth is overpopulated and food is scarce. A huge chunk of the world’s calories come from processing oil shale in Wyoming. They heat the rock, extract oil from it, grow bacteria and yeast on the oil, and that becomes food. Five trillion calories a day. Half the protein for a fifth of the planet.
Rob inherited his father’s job in these mines. He started at twelve, half-time. By sixteen he had his father’s rating: charge driller. That means he was the guy setting explosives in the rock face.
The description of this work is brutal. You ride down the shaft at sixty kilometers per hour with slimy walls ten inches from your shoulder. Pohl mentions miners who reached out a hand to steady themselves and pulled back a stump. You drill, you set charges, you back into a side tunnel and hope the whole thing does not collapse on you.
If you’re buried alive you can live up to a week in the loose shale. People have. When they don’t get rescued until after the third day they’re usually never any good for anything anymore.
That sentence stuck with me. Not because it is dramatic. Because it is so matter of fact. Rob says it like he is reading a safety manual. That is just how life works down there.
The Heechee Hut
Pohl drops one of his in-world ads between the sections here. It is for a tourist attraction called “The Heechee Hut” selling artifacts from the Venus tunnels:
Direct from the Lost Tunnels of Venus!
Rare Religious Objects Priceless Gems Once Worn by the Secret Race Astounding Scientific Discoveries
EVERY ITEM GUARANTEED AUTHENTIC!
Adults, $2.50 Children, $1.00 Delbert Guyne, Ph.D., D.D., Proprietor
This is one of Pohl’s signature moves. He puts classified ads, notices, and reports between chapters. They look like junk mail from the future. But they do serious work. This ad tells you that Heechee artifacts are both mysterious and already commercialized. Sacred objects sold at county fair prices. Humanity found alien technology and immediately figured out how to make it tacky.
The Smell You Cannot Escape
The food mines do not just take your health. They take everything. The oil fog gets into your clothes, your skin, your lungs. The masks supposedly filter out the hydrocarbons. Rob is not convinced.
His mother needed a new lung. She was not the only miner who did. She was not the only one who could not pay for it either.
Outside the mines, Wyoming looks like the surface of the Moon. Nothing green. No birds, no animals. The creeks run bright red under the oil. There are parks with lawns that need to be washed with detergent every week or they die. The sunsets are orange-brown through the haze. The extractor furnaces roar all day and all night.
And the food? The oil grows slime in culture sheds. They skim it, dry it, press it, and everyone eats it for breakfast.
Pohl throws in this killer line at the end of the description: “In the old days oil used to bubble right out of the ground! And all people thought to do with it was stick it in their automobiles and burn it up.”
Written in 1977. Still hits in 2019.
Why Rob Could Not Leave
The pay in the mines was decent but never enough. Not enough for Full Medical. Not enough to get out. Just enough to be a “local success story.” You work, you chase girls who smell like shale oil just like you do, you drink cheap liquor that comes off the same distillery no matter what label they put on it, and you play the lottery.
Rob’s mother died while he was in a psychiatric facility. He had a breakdown at twenty-six. Trouble with a girl named Sylvia, then he could not get out of bed. They put him in a “shrink tank” for almost a year. During that time, his mother needed medical treatment. There was only enough money for one of them.
Rob got therapy. His mother got nothing. She died.
He is very direct about this: “Face it: that was my fault.”
He does not blame the system, even though the system is clearly broken. He does not blame the doctors or the mining company. He blames himself. He needed help to survive mentally, and the cost of that help killed his mother physically.
This guilt connects directly back to Chapter 1. The man on the therapy mat, screaming that he cannot cope. He has been carrying this since he was twenty-six years old.
The Ticket Out
After his mother died, Rob kept living in her apartment. He thought about marriage but could not bring himself to start a family in the mines. “I didn’t want to leave a son of mine the way my father had left me.”
And then, the day after Christmas, he won the lottery. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Enough to live well for a year. Enough to support a family if both partners worked. Or enough for a one-way ticket to Gateway.
Rob took the ticket.
He went to the travel office and traded his lottery winnings for passage. Had about ten thousand left over. He bought drinks for his entire shift and whoever else showed up. The party lasted about twenty-four hours. Then he staggered through a Wyoming blizzard back to the travel office.
Five months later, he was staring out a porthole at a Brazilian military cruiser, arriving at Gateway.
No looking back. No second thoughts. Just out.
What This Chapter Sets Up
Chapter 2 answers a question that Chapter 1 raised. Why would a man who has everything be so broken?
Because “everything” is relative. Rob came from nothing. From a place that kills your parents and poisons your lungs and makes you eat processed slime for breakfast. He escaped by pure luck, a lottery number. Not skill, not talent, not hard work. Just luck.
And he already knows what it costs to survive. His mother paid for his survival with her life. Whatever happened on Gateway, whatever Rob is hiding from Sigfrid, it happened to someone who already knew that staying alive means someone else might not.
That is a heavy thing to carry into space.
Previous: Chapter 1 - Therapy and Guilt