Gateway Chapter 10: Parties, Fear, and the Launch Nobody Takes
This is a big chapter. A lot happens. And by the end of it, nothing happens at all. That is the whole point.
We are on Rob’s fifth day on Gateway. He has finished training. He knows how the ships work, as much as anyone can know. He has learned the odds. He has done the classes. Now he is supposed to pick a mission and launch.
He does not.
Breakfast with Gateway Royalty
Rob starts the day at the Heecheetown Arms hotel. The breakfast is expensive because everything on Gateway is expensive. Air, water, food, all shipped from Earth or Venus at insane cost.
At breakfast, he meets the Forehands. They are relatives of Sylvester Macklen, the guy who literally discovered Gateway. And they tell Rob the full Macklen story. It is not a happy one.
Macklen found a Heechee ship on Venus. He got inside it, probably messed with the controls, and the thing launched. It flew him to Gateway. By accident. He did not know where he was going. He did not know how to go back.
When he got to Gateway, he realized what he had found. Hundreds of alien ships. An entire station. The discovery of the century. But he was alone. No food. No way to call for help.
Macklen waited. Nobody came.
He cut his own throat.
That is the founding story of Gateway. The man who found it died alone inside it, surrounded by the greatest treasure in human history. If you ever needed a metaphor for this whole book, there it is.
Learning the Business
In class, Rob learns about out-pilots. These are people who ferry ships between Gateway and Gateway Two, another Heechee station that was discovered by prospectors. Some of those prospectors got rich. Really rich. They found an entire second base and now they get royalties every time someone uses it.
This is the dream. Find something big, come back alive, collect money forever. But for every team that found Gateway Two, there are dozens that found nothing. Or did not come back.
Rob is doing math in his head. We can feel it. He is weighing the risk against the reward, and the math is not working in his favor.
Central Park and Klara
After class, Rob helps Dane Metchnikov move cargo. Dane is shipping out the next day with Terry Yakamora on flight 30-107. Rob watches them prepare and probably wonders if he will ever do the same.
Then Rob visits Central Park. Not the one in New York. Gateway has its own version. It is a vegetated tunnel near the center of the asteroid, full of plants and oxygen and green things. The closest thing to nature you can find in a rock floating in space.
And there is Klara.
She is playing with a borrowed child. Not her kid. Someone else’s. But she looks relaxed. Happy, even. Different from the sharp, focused instructor Rob knows from class. She is softer here. More human.
This is the first time we see Klara outside of her role. She is not teaching survival techniques or explaining mission protocols. She is just a woman in a park, pretending the world is normal for a few minutes.
Rob notices. Of course he notices.
The Farewell Party
That evening, there is a farewell party for Dane Metchnikov at Terry Yakamora’s place. Dane is leaving tomorrow. This might be the last time anyone sees him alive. On Gateway, every party could be a funeral that just does not know it yet.
Rob goes. He sees Hereira again, a face from earlier chapters. People are drinking. People are pretending to be brave. It is what you do the night before someone gets into an alien ship and presses a button that could take them anywhere or nowhere.
Cutting Cards for Your Life
After the farewell, there is a graduation party for Rob’s class. They have finished training. Now they get to choose their first missions.
The way it works is they cut cards. Highest card picks first from the available launches. Rob draws well enough. But when his turn comes, he passes.
He looks at the list of available missions. The good ones are already taken. What is left are the rejects. Missions with bad odds. Ships that nobody wants to fly. Destinations that nobody has come back from.
Rob passes. He tells himself it is because the options are bad. But that is not why.
Sheri Calls It Out
Sheri, one of his classmates, picks a mission. She chooses an armored Three with a bonus. That means it is a three-person ship with extra shielding, going somewhere dangerous enough that the Corporation pays extra just to get people to go.
She tells Rob to join her crew. She needs people.
He says no.
And Sheri, because she is Sheri, says what everyone is thinking. She tells him he is scared. She says he is just like Klara.
That last part hits different. Because Rob looks at Klara. And he sees it. The same frozen expression he probably has on his own face. Klara is afraid too. She has been on Gateway for how long? Teaching classes. Helping new prospectors. But not launching herself.
Klara is stuck. Rob is stuck. They are both sitting on top of the greatest opportunity in human history and they cannot move.
Fear as the Real Villain
This chapter does not end with action. It ends with paralysis. Rob is trained. He is ready. He knows the ships, the odds, the protocols. And he cannot do it.
The genius of Pohl here is that he does not judge Rob. He does not make him a coward. He makes him human. Because the fear is rational. The odds are genuinely terrible. People die on these missions all the time. We watched someone die in training just a couple chapters ago.
Being scared of Gateway is not irrational. It is smart. The irrational ones are the people who launch without thinking about it.
But the problem is that Rob came here for a reason. He spent everything he had to get to Gateway. He has nothing to go back to. If he does not launch, he just sits here, spending money on expensive breakfasts until the cash runs out.
The Macklen story from the beginning of the chapter echoes here. The man who found Gateway died inside it. And now Rob is sitting inside it too, not quite dead but not quite living either. Surrounded by ships he will not fly. Watching other people leave while he stays behind.
The chapter ends and Rob has not launched. Fear won this round.
Book: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977) | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Winner
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