Gateway Chapter 18: Coming Back to Gateway with Nothing
They are back. Forty-six days in a tiny Heechee ship, cramped and scared and hoping for something, and they are back with nothing. No discovery. No bonus. No glory. Just a docking clamp and a medical team and the smell of a ship that has been lived in too long by too many people.
This chapter is about what failure looks like on Gateway. And it looks worse than you think.
The Boarding Crew Opens the Hatch
When the ship docks, the boarding crew comes in to check on the prospectors. This is standard procedure. Every ship that returns gets inspected. The crew gets checked for health, for radiation, for whatever alien thing they might have picked up out there.
But when they open this ship, what they find is not standard.
Sam Kahane is in a straitjacket. Not a real one. A makeshift one. The crew had to restrain him using whatever they could find on the ship. He is sitting in filth. The man has had a complete psychological breakdown somewhere between here and wherever they went, and nobody could do anything about it except tie him up and wait for the ship to come home.
Think about that for a second. You are in a tiny ship. Smaller than a studio apartment. One of your crewmates loses his mind. There is no hospital. No psychiatrist. No sedatives. You cannot call for help. You cannot land somewhere. You just have to deal with it, in that tiny space, for however many days are left until the ship decides to bring you back.
That is the reality of Gateway prospecting. The danger is not just death. It is being trapped with someone who is falling apart, in a box you cannot escape from, moving through space you do not control.
Medical Checks and Debriefing
Rob and the rest of the crew go through the standard post-mission process. Medical exams. Physical checks. Blood work. The Corporation wants to know everything. Not because they care about the prospectors, exactly. They care about the data. Every mission, successful or not, teaches them something about what is out there.
Then comes the debriefing. This is long and detailed. The Corporation wants to know what they saw, what the instruments recorded, what happened with Sam, when the breakdown started, what triggered it. Everything.
Rob sits through all of it. He is tired. He is disappointed. He went out there hoping to find something that would change his life, and he came back with a story about a crewmate who went crazy and a destination that had nothing useful.
This is the most common outcome on Gateway and nobody talks about it. The brochures do not mention it. The recruiters do not bring it up. Most missions fail. Most prospectors come back with nothing. And the ones who come back are the lucky ones.
Dane Metchnikov Returns
During the debriefing, Rob runs into a familiar face. Dane Metchnikov.
We remember Dane from earlier chapters. He shipped out with Terry Yakamora back in Chapter 10. Rob watched them leave. Now Dane is back, and he has his own story.
Dane’s mission went to a star that was going nova. Think about that for a moment. You get into an alien ship, press the button, and the ship takes you to an exploding star. No warning. No way to know in advance. The Heechee set the destination centuries ago, and whatever was there then is not there now.
Dane survived. But the mission was a failure. No bonus. No discovery. Just a very close look at a dying star and a fast ride home.
Dane appears as one of the debriefers. He has been back long enough to start working at the Corporation, helping process other people’s failed missions. That tells you something about Gateway. Even the experienced prospectors, the ones who survive, end up doing paperwork. The adventure does not last. The bureaucracy always wins.
Sam Kahane Is Dead
And then Rob gets the news.
Sam Kahane killed himself. In Terminal Hospital. The place where they put the broken ones, the ones who come back wrong, the ones who cannot handle what happened out there.
Sam did not survive Gateway. Not really. His body made it back. His mind did not. And at some point between the medical checks and whatever passed for treatment, Sam decided he was done.
Pohl does not give us a dramatic scene. No final words. No bedside moment. Just information. Rob hears about it the way you hear about most deaths. Someone tells you. You process it. You sit with it.
And then you keep going, because what else can you do?
This is maybe the hardest thing about this chapter. Sam’s death is treated as routine. Not by the characters, exactly. Rob is affected. But by the system. The Corporation logs it. Terminal Hospital files the paperwork. Another prospector lost. The numbers update. The next class of recruits arrives.
Gateway eats people. It has been eating people since Sylvester Macklen cut his own throat inside it. And it will keep eating people as long as there are desperate souls willing to gamble their sanity for a chance at a bonus.
Dr. Asmenion’s Notes on Stars
The chapter includes one of those informational inserts Pohl likes to use. This one is from Dr. Asmenion, and it is about stellar classification. Which types of stars are worth investigating. Which ones might have planets. Which ones are likely to yield a bonus.
It is technical and dry and reads like a textbook entry. And Pohl puts it right after the news of Sam’s death. On purpose.
Because that is Gateway. A man kills himself, and the next page is a lecture about stellar spectral types. The human cost and the corporate manual, side by side. One paragraph about a broken man who could not go on. The next paragraph about which category of star has the best return on investment.
The contrast is brutal. And Pohl does not even comment on it. He just puts the two things next to each other and trusts you to feel the weight.
What Failure Means on Gateway
This chapter is about failure, but not the kind you recover from easily.
Rob failed his mission. That is a financial setback. He spent time and risk and came back with nothing. He will need to try again or go home broke.
Sam Kahane failed something bigger. He failed at surviving the experience. The mission broke something inside him that could not be fixed, and he chose to end it rather than live with whatever was left.
And Dane Metchnikov? Dane survived, technically. But he is back at Gateway doing debriefings. He is not rich. He is not a hero. He is processing paperwork for the Corporation that almost got him killed by a nova.
Three kinds of failure. Financial, psychological, existential. And Gateway produces all three in industrial quantities.
The thing that gets me about this chapter is how normal all of it feels by now. We are eighteen chapters in. We have seen people die. We have seen people break. We have seen people make terrible choices because the alternative was worse. And we are starting to accept it the way the characters accept it. As the cost of doing business.
That is Pohl’s trick. He does not want you to be shocked anymore. He wants you to be numb. Because that is what Gateway does to the people who live there. It makes death and failure feel like weather. Something that just happens. Something you check on in the morning and plan around.
Sam Kahane is dead. The debriefing is over. Tomorrow there will be new missions on the board.
Rob will look at them and think about trying again.
Book: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977) | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Winner
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