Gateway Chapter 13: When Your Therapist Changes the Furniture
You walk into your therapist’s office and everything has changed. The mat is gone. The mobiles are gone. The fake Hawaiian surf is gone. Instead there is a couch. A traditional, old-school psychoanalyst’s couch. And your therapist, who used to be a voice and some abstract shapes, is now a dummy sitting in a chair wearing dark glasses.
That is what happens to Rob in Chapter 13. And he does not handle it well.
New Office, Same Problems
Rob shows up for his session and the whole environment is different. Sigfrid has redecorated. The foam mat where Rob used to lie down and kick and scream is replaced by a leather couch. The walls have holoviews of space scenes. Stars, nebulae, deep space stuff. And Sigfrid himself is no longer just a voice. He is now represented as a physical dummy. A mannequin with dark glasses, sitting across from Rob like a real psychiatrist.
It is a small change if you think about it. A couch instead of a mat. A dummy instead of nothing. Some pictures on the wall.
But for Rob, it is a disaster.
Why It Bothers Him
Rob feels manipulated. And honestly? He is not wrong. Sigfrid is a computer program. Every single thing in that room is a deliberate choice. The couch is there for a reason. The space scenes are there for a reason. The dark glasses are there for a reason. Nothing about Sigfrid is accidental. He was designed to get inside your head, and redecorating is just another tool in the toolkit.
Rob knows this. He is not stupid. He understands that every element of the environment is calculated to provoke a response, to make him feel something, to push him toward whatever Sigfrid thinks he needs to confront.
And that is exactly why it makes him angry. Because it works.
The Boring Dream
Before the redecoration fight really kicks off, Rob tells Sigfrid about a dream. It is, by his own admission, a boring dream. Women on a train. Nothing dramatic. No monsters, no falling, no space disasters. Just women on a train.
Sigfrid, being Sigfrid, probably thinks the dream is not boring at all. With Sigfrid, the boring stuff is always the important stuff. The things you dismiss are the things you are hiding from. But Rob does not want to go deeper into the dream. He wants to talk about the furniture.
This is classic Rob. He picks the fight he can win instead of the conversation he needs to have. The dream might tell him something about himself. The furniture argument just lets him feel righteous.
Wyoming Comes Back
Here is where the chapter gets heavier. The redecorated office reminds Rob of something from his past. His psychotic episode in Wyoming.
We have heard bits about this before. Rob had a breakdown. A real one. Not just crying in therapy, but a full psychiatric crisis. And during his treatment in Wyoming, they used holographic illusions as part of his therapy. Projections. Fake environments designed to help him process whatever was breaking him apart.
The connection is obvious. Sigfrid’s new holoviews, the space scenes on the walls, the whole redesigned room. It feels like Wyoming all over again. It feels like being a patient in a facility, surrounded by carefully chosen images meant to reach into his brain and rearrange things.
Rob does not want to be that person again. He does not want to be the guy in Wyoming who needed holographic tricks to stay sane. He has come too far. He is rich now. He is successful. He pays Sigfrid a lot of money for these sessions. He is supposed to be in control.
But the new office reminds him that he is not in control. Sigfrid is. And that is terrifying.
Rob Takes a Stand
So Rob does something he rarely does. He demands that Sigfrid change everything back before the next session. No more couch. No more dummy. No more space pictures. Put it back the way it was.
And this is the interesting part. Rob walks out of the session feeling good. He feels empowered. He stood up to Sigfrid. He asserted himself. He drew a line and said “no more.” In his mind, this is therapeutic progress. He is learning to take control, to set boundaries, to fight back.
But is he?
Think about it. What did Rob actually do? He avoided the dream conversation. He refused to explore why the redecoration bothered him so much. He turned a therapy session into a power struggle about furniture. And then he declared victory because he got the furniture changed.
That is not progress. That is avoidance with better packaging. Rob is still running. He is just running in a way that feels like standing still.
Mission Report: The One Who Stayed
At the end of the chapter, we get another mission report. These reports are scattered throughout the book, and they are always grim.
This one is about a solo pilot. Someone who went out alone in a One. They landed on a planet with high gravity and an active sun. The kind of place where the star is pumping out radiation and the gravity pins you down and the whole environment is trying to kill you.
The pilot never came back.
That is it. No details about what happened. No dramatic last transmission. Just a person who went somewhere terrible and stayed there forever. One more name on the list of people Gateway swallowed.
These mission reports do important work in the book. They remind you that while Rob is arguing about couches, people are dying in space. While he fights with his therapist about furniture, someone is alone on a planet being crushed by gravity, burning under a hostile sun, knowing that nobody is coming.
It puts Rob’s problems in perspective. But also, in a weird way, it makes them bigger. Because Rob survived. He came back. And he still cannot function. Whatever happened to him out there was bad enough that even surviving it was not enough to save him.
The Therapy Game
Chapter 13 is really about the relationship between Rob and Sigfrid. And it is a strange relationship, because one of them is a machine.
Sigfrid does not have feelings. He does not get hurt when Rob yells at him. He does not feel proud when Rob makes progress. He processes data and generates responses. That is all.
But Rob treats him like a person. He gets angry at Sigfrid. He feels manipulated by Sigfrid. He tries to assert dominance over Sigfrid. He walks out feeling like he won an argument with Sigfrid.
You cannot win an argument with a program. The program does not care about winning. The program only cares about whether you are getting better. And by that measure, Rob lost this round. He spent the entire session avoiding everything that matters and then congratulated himself for it.
But that is therapy, right? Sometimes you have to lose a hundred small battles before you can face the big one. And Rob is not ready for the big one yet. Not even close.
Book: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977) | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Winner
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