Gateway Chapter 4: First Look at the Alien Asteroid
After two therapy chapters and one backstory chapter, we finally get to see Gateway itself. And it does not disappoint.
The Approach
Rob’s ship is coming in toward the asteroid, and he describes it as a charred, pear-shaped blob. Not pretty. Not shiny. Not what you expect from alien technology in most sci-fi. It looks like a burnt rock floating in space.
But there are hints. Bits of blue metallurgy visible under the charred surface. The Heechee built this thing, and even after who knows how many thousands of years, traces of their work still show through.
Rob and the other prospectors, including a woman named Sheri Loffat, are pressed against the portholes trying to get their first look. Imagine that. You have traveled all the way from Earth or Venus, spent everything you have on this trip, and now you are staring at the thing that might make you rich or kill you.
Around the asteroid, multiple national cruisers are orbiting. Brazilian. Russian. Chinese. American. They circle Gateway like jealous guard dogs. Because whatever the Heechee left behind is valuable enough for every major nation to park a warship next to it.
That little detail tells you a lot about the politics of this world. Humanity found alien technology. And the first thing they did was point guns at each other over who gets to control it. Sounds about right.
The Backstory of Gateway
Pohl drops the origin story here, and it is wild.
A guy named Sylvester Macklen was working as a tunnel rat on Venus. Digging through Heechee tunnels underground. And he found a spaceship. Not just any spaceship. A working Heechee ship.
So Macklen does what any reasonable person would do. He gets in and activates it.
The ship took him to Gateway. This random asteroid out in space, far from everything. And inside the asteroid, he found almost a thousand more ships. Small, mushroom-shaped vessels, all sitting there waiting.
But here is the sad part. Macklen could not get back. He did not know how to reactivate the ship to return to Venus. He sent out radio signals, hoping someone would find him. And while he waited, alone on an alien asteroid with a thousand empty ships, he lost it. He cut his own throat.
They found his body later, when the rescue mission finally reached Gateway.
I always think about Macklen when I read this chapter. He is the guy who made everything possible. Without him, there would be no Gateway, no prospectors, no story. And he died alone in an alien tunnel, unable to get home. Pohl does not spend much time on him, but that image stays with you.
Nobody Knows How to Fly These Things
This is the detail that makes Gateway different from every other “humans find alien tech” story.
They have almost a thousand Heechee ships. They can turn them on. They can sit in the seats and press the buttons. But they cannot control where the ships go.
Every ship has a pre-programmed course. You activate it, and it takes you somewhere. Maybe to another star. Maybe to an empty spot in space. Maybe to a black hole. You do not know until you get there. And you might not come back.
The navigation systems are Heechee technology, and nobody has figured out how to read them. Scientists have been studying these ships and they still cannot crack the code. You are basically rolling the dice with your life every time you launch.
The first pilot who came back had been gone for three months. He returned with stories of another star system. Proof that the ships work, proof that they go somewhere real.
The second crew found ruins of a dead civilization out there. Not Heechee ruins. Some other species that lived and died while the Heechee ships sat waiting.
And that was enough. The word spread, the governments set up shop, and suddenly people were lining up to get inside alien ships with no idea where they would end up. The age of prospecting began.
The Professor Hegramet Q&A
The chapter includes a section with Professor Hegramet answering questions about the Heechee. This is one of those worldbuilding inserts that Pohl uses throughout the book. Classified ads, mission reports, lecture transcripts. They break up the narrative and make the world feel real.
From the Q&A we learn more about the state of human knowledge. Which is basically: we know almost nothing. The Heechee left their ships, their tunnels on Venus, and some artifacts. But nobody knows what they looked like, where they came from, or why they left.
The Heechee are the biggest mystery in this universe. And Pohl keeps them mysterious. He does not explain them away. He lets the questions sit there, making everything feel bigger than what one person can understand.
What It Means to Be a Prospector
Think about the kind of person who would do this.
You get in a ship built by aliens who disappeared thousands of years ago. You press a button. The ship takes you somewhere unknown. Maybe you find something valuable and come back rich. Maybe you find nothing and waste months of your life. Maybe the ship takes you into a star and you die in seconds.
And you do this voluntarily. You pay to do this.
That tells you something about desperation. These are not thrill seekers. Most of them are broke. Most of them have nothing to lose. The food mines on Earth are running out. Venus is a hellhole. Gateway is the only lottery ticket available, and the odds are terrible.
Rob is one of these people. He won some money in a lottery and used it to buy a ticket to Gateway. He is not brave. He is not special. He is desperate. And that makes him the perfect main character for this kind of story.
My Take on Chapter 4
This is the chapter where the book opens up. The first three chapters were tight and claustrophobic. Therapy sessions, memories of food mines, fragments of guilt. But now we are in space, approaching an alien artifact, and the scale of the story becomes clear.
I love the detail about the national cruisers circling the asteroid. In one image, Pohl shows you that this is still a human story even though we are talking about alien ships. We found the most important discovery in history, and we immediately started fighting over who owns it.
And Macklen’s story is haunting. The guy who found it all and died alone. That sets the tone for everything that follows. Gateway gives people hope, but it takes a price. Always.
What strikes me most is the navigation problem. You cannot control where you go. In most sci-fi, humans eventually figure out the alien tech. They reverse engineer it. They become masters of it. But in Gateway, the tech stays alien. It stays beyond human understanding. And people use it anyway, because they have no better options.
That feels honest to me. That feels like how it would actually go.
Book: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977) | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Winner
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