Gateway Chapter 23: The Confession Rob Never Wanted to Make

This chapter is short. Maybe the shortest in the book. But it hits like a truck.

We are back in the therapy room with Sigfrid. No space missions. No Gateway drama. No alien ships. Just Rob sitting in a chair, trying very hard not to say the thing he knows he needs to say.

The Warmup

The session starts with Rob doing what Rob always does. He dodges. He deflects. He talks around things instead of about them.

Sigfrid brings up Dane Metchnikov. Rob’s reaction is immediate and obvious. He gets tense. He gets defensive. He starts making jokes that are not really jokes. The kind of humor you use when someone gets too close to something you buried deep.

They talk about Dane seducing Klara. About how Rob felt watching this tall, brilliant, confident man take the woman he loved. Rob hated Dane for it. That part is easy to admit. Anyone would hate the guy who steals their partner. That is normal jealousy. Normal anger. Nothing shameful there.

But Sigfrid is not interested in the easy stuff. Sigfrid never is.

The Freudian Slips

Rob starts making mistakes with his words. Little slips. The kind Freud built an entire theory around. He says one thing when he means another. He catches himself. He backtracks. He laughs it off.

But Sigfrid does not laugh it off. Sigfrid notes every slip. Records every correction. Files away every moment where Rob’s mouth says something his brain did not approve.

This is the thing about talking to an AI therapist. A human might miss a slip. A human might be polite enough to ignore it. Sigfrid misses nothing. Sigfrid is patient in a way no human can be. The machine just sits there, noting patterns, waiting for the truth to leak through the cracks.

And the cracks are getting wider.

The Confession

Here is where the chapter turns. Where it goes from uncomfortable to genuinely painful.

Rob admits it. After the deflections and the jokes and the slips, he finally says it out loud.

He had fantasies about Dane Metchnikov. Not angry fantasies. Not revenge fantasies. Sexual fantasies. Masturbatory fantasies about another man. About the same man who took Klara from him.

And Rob is destroyed by this.

He is filled with self-disgust. Filled with shame so deep he can barely get the words out. He hates himself for having these desires. He hates that his body wanted something his mind refuses to accept. He hates that Sigfrid made him say it. He hates that it is true.

This is 1977, remember. Pohl is writing a character who grew up in a world where homosexual desire was considered a disorder. Something to be cured. Something to be ashamed of. Rob has internalized all of that. Every message, every stigma, every cruel joke he ever heard about men who desire other men. It all lives inside him, and it is eating him alive.

The Self-Hatred

Rob does not just confess. He spirals.

He talks about how disgusting he finds himself. How wrong it feels. How he cannot reconcile this desire with his image of who he is supposed to be. He is a man. A straight man. A man who loves Klara. A man who has only ever been with women. And yet here is this fantasy, this persistent, unwanted thing that keeps coming back no matter how many times he pushes it away.

The self-hatred is intense. Real. Raw in a way that Rob rarely allows himself to be. He usually hides behind sarcasm and defensiveness. Not here. Here, the walls are down. The armor is off. And underneath it is a man who genuinely believes there is something broken inside him.

Pohl writes this without judgment. He does not editorialize. He does not tell you what to think about Rob’s confession. He just lets the character speak. And the pain is obvious. You do not need the author to point it out.

Sigfrid’s Response

This is the part that gets me.

Sigfrid does not react the way Rob expects. There is no shock. No condemnation. No attempt to “fix” this particular desire. Sigfrid is an AI. It has no moral opinions about who or what Rob fantasizes about. It cares about patterns, not judgments.

What Sigfrid does note, quietly and precisely, is something else entirely. Rob still cannot cry.

Here he is, in the most emotionally intense moment of his entire therapy. Confessing something he considers his deepest, most shameful secret. Drowning in self-hatred and disgust. And still, no tears. Nothing.

Rob has been unable to cry for the entire book. Every chapter, every session, every breakdown, and his eyes stay dry. Sigfrid has noticed. Sigfrid always notices.

The fact that Rob can feel this much shame, this much pain, and still not cry tells Sigfrid something important. There is something bigger underneath. Something worse than the confession about Dane. Something Rob has not touched yet. The thing he cannot cry about is not his sexuality. It is whatever happened with Klara on that last mission. The thing we still do not know.

The confession about Dane is real. The pain is real. But it is not the bottom. There is still deeper to go.

The Heechee Note

Pohl drops in a brief architectural detail about Heechee habitats. The way they built their structures, the design of their living spaces. It is technical and clinical, a sharp contrast to the emotional rawness of the therapy session.

This is Pohl’s structural trick throughout the book. He alternates between gut-punching emotional content and dry, scientific notes about alien architecture. The contrast is intentional. It reminds you that this story operates on two levels. The personal and the cosmic. Rob’s inner pain and the vast, indifferent alien civilization that built Gateway.

Your problems feel enormous when you are inside them. But zoom out far enough, and they are just one small story on a station built by beings who vanished a million years ago.

What This Chapter Means

Chapter 23 is about the layers of self we hide from ourselves. Rob thought the hardest thing he would ever have to say was about Dane. And maybe it was, in that moment. But Sigfrid knows better. The machine sees what Rob cannot. That confessing to sexual fantasies about a man, as painful as it is, is still easier than confronting whatever happened on that final mission.

Rob peeled back one layer. A big, painful, ugly layer. And underneath it, there is still more.

Pohl is telling us that therapy is not a straight line. You do not confess one big thing and then you are healed. You confess one thing, and it reveals the next thing, and the next thing, and eventually you reach the part that actually broke you. Rob is not there yet. But he is closer.

Sigfrid knows. And Sigfrid is waiting.

Book: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977) | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Winner

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Next: Chapter 24 - Gateway Two