Gateway Chapter 12: Plant Maintenance, Death Reports, and Finally Signing Up
This is a long chapter. It is also the chapter where everything changes. Rob has been frozen since he arrived on Gateway. Trained but not launching. Afraid but not leaving. Just existing in the most expensive waiting room in the solar system.
Chapter 12 is where the waiting ends.
Emma Fother Has Had Enough
It starts with a confrontation. Emma Fother is the personnel director on Gateway. Her job is to keep track of who is working, who is prospecting, and who is just burning through money while doing neither.
Rob falls into the third category.
Emma calls him out. She tells him, basically, that he cannot keep living like this. He finished training. He did not launch. He has no income. He is surviving on Klara’s kindness, sleeping in her space, eating on her credit. And Emma, who has seen hundreds of prospectors come and go, knows exactly what this looks like. It looks like a man who came to Gateway to change his life and then got too scared to do it.
She is not wrong. Rob knows she is not wrong. That is the worst part.
Emma does not kick him out. She does something more practical. She gets him a job.
The Ivy Man
Rob’s new job is plant maintenance under Shikitei Bakin. You remember Shikitei from earlier chapters. The kind man with no legs who brought Rob tea. He lost his legs on a mission. He came back alive but not whole. Now he tends ivy in Gateway’s tunnels. Someone has to keep the plants going for air quality and morale.
Rob takes the job. He is now officially a gardener on an alien space station. Not a prospector. Not an explorer. A guy who waters ivy.
He traveled all the way to Gateway, spent his lottery winnings to get here, trained to fly Heechee ships into the unknown. And now he trims plants. But at least he is earning something. At least he is not completely depending on Klara.
The Mission Reports
Here is where the chapter gets heavy.
Between the main story, Pohl includes mission reports. These are official documents from Gateway Corporation describing what happened to various crews. And they are devastating.
One report describes a crew that found a destroyed Heechee station. Something had wrecked it long ago. The crew went in to explore, hoping to find something valuable in the wreckage. They did not come back. The report is clinical about it. Matter-of-fact. Crew entered the structure. Contact lost. No recovery possible.
Another report describes a tractor-barge experiment. The Corporation was trying something new, some way to expand their reach using Heechee technology they barely understood. The crew died. Again, the report is calm. Professional. Like filling out paperwork about a broken machine, except the machine was full of people.
These reports do something important. They take the statistics from training class and make them personal. Remember when Jimmy Chou said 15% of missions do not come back? These are the 15%. These are the actual people, with names and crew assignments, who left and never returned.
Rob reads these. Everyone on Gateway reads them. They are posted publicly. And somehow, people still sign up for missions. That tells you everything about how desperate the people on Gateway really are.
Shikitei’s Letter
Tucked into this chapter is a letter from Shikitei Bakin to his grandson. It is one of the most touching pieces of writing in the entire book.
Shikitei writes about getting old. About the cost of prosthetic limbs, which on Gateway pricing might as well be the cost of a small house. He writes about missing his family, about mortality, about the strange reality of living on a rock in space while his grandson grows up on Earth. Not dramatic. Just honest. The way an old man writes when he knows his time is limited.
This letter humanizes the background characters. Shikitei is not just the legless man who brings tea. He is a grandfather. He lost his legs doing the same thing Rob is too scared to do. And he is still here, still gentle, still caring for plants and people.
The price of prospecting is not just death. It is limbs, health, years away from people you love. Even the survivors pay.
Willa Comes Back
A small but funny moment. Willa Forehand returns from what might be the shortest prospecting trip in Gateway history. Her ship went to Earth’s Moon. The Moon. You can see it from New York on a clear night.
She did not find anything valuable. Obviously. Humans already know the Moon. There is nothing there that the Heechee left behind, or at least nothing her ship found.
But she came back alive. And on Gateway, that counts for something.
Jan Dies
Then the chapter hits you with the real punch.
Jan, a character we have gotten to know, dies from a fungal infection. Not on a mission. Not in the vacuum of space. From a fungus. On the station.
Gateway is not just dangerous because of the ships. The station itself can kill you. Diseases spread in the alien environment. Medical facilities are not exactly state of the art.
Jan’s death shakes Rob. It shakes Klara too. Because Jan did not fly into the unknown. Jan just lived on Gateway and the place killed her anyway.
The lesson is ugly. You can die on Gateway whether you launch or not. Staying safe by not flying is not actually staying safe.
Rob and Klara
Through all of this, Rob and Klara are growing closer. It is not a dramatic romance. It is two scared people holding on to each other because everything around them keeps getting worse.
Klara has been stuck on Gateway even longer than Rob. She knows the odds better than almost anyone. And she is still here, still not launching, still frozen. But Jan’s death changes the math. If you can die from a fungal infection just by living on Gateway, what exactly are you saving by not flying?
Filing for Launch 29-40
And then it happens. Rob and Klara file for a mission.
They sign up for Launch 29-40. It is a Five, a five-person ship. Their crew includes Sam Kahane and two other companions. Five people in an alien ship, pointed at a destination nobody can predict, hoping to find something valuable and come back alive.
This is the moment the entire book has been building toward. Ten chapters of fear, delay, paralysis, and excuses. And now Rob is committed. His name is on a list. The launch has a number. There is no more maybe.
What pushes him over the edge is not courage. It is the accumulation of everything else. Jan’s death. Klara’s desperation. Emma’s confrontation. The mission reports full of dead people. The realization that Gateway will eat you alive whether you fly or not. At some point, the fear of staying becomes bigger than the fear of going.
Rob does not announce this decision with a speech. He does not have a hero moment. He just signs a form. That is how it works on Gateway. You fill out paperwork and then you might die.
Why This Chapter Matters
Chapter 12 is the turning point of the book. Everything before this was setup. Rob arriving, training, freezing, making excuses. Everything after this will be consequences. The launch, the mission, whatever happened that put Rob in Sigfrid’s office years later.
Pohl is patient. He made us wait twelve chapters for Rob to do the thing he came to Gateway to do. And by the time it happens, we understand why it took so long. The fear was real. The danger was real. The people dying in those mission reports were real.
Rob is not brave. He is just out of options. And sometimes that is enough.
Book: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977) | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Winner
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