Gateway Chapter 3: The Memory Rob Can't Face
This chapter is short. But it hits hard.
We are back in therapy with Sigfrid von Shrink, the AI psychiatrist. And this time, Sigfrid is not letting Rob dodge the hard questions.
Sigfrid Wants to Talk About Klara
The name that keeps coming up is Gelle-Klara Moynlin. Klara. Rob’s… well, it is complicated. We do not know exactly what she was to him yet. Girlfriend? Love of his life? Someone he hurt? All of the above?
What we do know is that Sigfrid keeps pushing Rob to talk about his last conversation with Klara. And Rob keeps trying to change the subject. He dances around it like someone walking near the edge of a cliff. Gets close, then backs off.
Rob admits something important here. He says that remembering Klara involves “an intensity of pain and guilt and misery” that he just cannot handle. Those are his exact words. Pain. Guilt. Misery. Three words that tell us everything and nothing at the same time.
Something really bad happened. And Rob was part of it.
The Fragments Rob Lets Slip
Even though Rob is fighting the memories, bits and pieces leak through. He remembers talking to Klara on the radio. He remembers feeling afraid. Really afraid. The kind of fear that gets into your bones.
He describes descending into a blue mist. And seeing what he calls a “dim ghost star.”
These fragments sound like something that happened during a space mission. A mission that went very wrong. We do not get the full picture. Not even close. Pohl is feeding us tiny crumbs, and each one makes you more hungry for the whole story.
A blue mist. A ghost star. A radio conversation with someone named Klara. And fear so deep that years later, a rich man sitting in a therapist’s office still cannot face it.
Sigfrid Knows When You Lie
Here is the thing that makes the therapy sessions in this book different from what you might expect. Sigfrid is not just listening to what Rob says. He is monitoring everything.
Pulse rate. Skin conductivity. Beta waves in the brain.
Sigfrid tells Rob straight up that he knows when Rob is lying. He knows when Rob is avoiding something. The machine can literally read his body’s reactions and compare them to what comes out of his mouth.
Think about that for a second. You are sitting in a therapist’s office, trying to hide your worst memory, and the therapist can see your heart rate spike every time you get close to the truth. There is nowhere to hide.
This is a book from 1977 predicting biometric monitoring in therapy. Pohl was way ahead of his time. Today we have smartwatches tracking heart rate variability and stress levels. The idea of a machine knowing your emotional state better than you do is not science fiction anymore.
But Rob still tries to lie. Even knowing that Sigfrid can see right through him. That tells you how painful this memory is. He would rather get caught lying than face whatever happened with Klara.
Why This Short Chapter Matters
Chapter 3 is maybe five pages long. But it does a lot of work.
First, it establishes that the therapy is not just background noise. It is the real story. The space stuff, the prospecting, the Heechee technology. All of that happened in the past. The present is Rob in this chair, trying to become a whole person again.
Second, it gives us the emotional stakes. We know Rob is rich. We know he survived. But surviving and living are two different things. Whatever happened with Klara left him broken in a way that money cannot fix.
Third, Pohl is teaching us how to read this book. He is saying: pay attention to what Rob does not say. The gaps and the silences are where the real story lives. When Rob changes the subject, that is when you should lean in.
And fourth, those fragments. The blue mist. The ghost star. The radio. These are puzzle pieces that we will carry with us through the whole book. Every time we learn something new, we will try to fit it together with what we got here.
The Guilt Question
I want to talk about that word. Guilt.
Not pain. Not fear. Guilt.
Pain means something bad happened to you. Fear means you were scared. But guilt means you did something. Or did not do something. Guilt means Rob is not just a victim of whatever went wrong. He was part of it. Maybe he caused it.
That is what makes this book so much more than a space adventure. Rob is not trying to recover from trauma that happened to him. He is trying to live with something he did. Or something he failed to do. And there is a massive difference.
We all know that feeling on some level. The thing you said that you cannot take back. The moment you chose yourself over someone else. Pohl is tapping into something very human here, even though the setting is outer space and alien ships.
My Take on Chapter 3
For such a short chapter, this one stuck with me. I kept thinking about the idea of a therapist who can read your body like a book. We lie to ourselves all the time. We push down memories. We tell ourselves it was not that bad or it was not our fault.
But what if someone could see right through all of that? What if the truth was written in your pulse rate and your sweat glands and your brain waves? Would you still try to hide?
Rob does. And that tells us everything about how deep this goes.
Pohl is building something here. Layer by layer. And each therapy session strips away a little more of Rob’s defenses. We are getting closer to the truth about Klara, about the ghost star, about what happened on that ship.
But not yet. Not yet.
Book: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977) | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Winner
Previous: Chapter 2 - Food Mines and Escape