Gateway Chapter 24: Solo Mission to the Wrong Place
Rob is alone in space. A One-class ship. Just him and the Heechee controls and fifty-five days of silence.
If the last chapter was about emotional nakedness, this one is about physical and psychological isolation pushed to the breaking point. Pohl gives us everything here. Space adventure, discovery, disaster, rescue, and then the most disturbing therapy session in the entire book.
Let me take it piece by piece.
Fifty-Five Days Alone
A One is the smallest Heechee ship. Room for one person. That is it. No crew to talk to. No Klara to fight with. No Metchnikov to resent. Just Rob, the recycled air, the food packets, and his own thoughts.
Fifty-five days of that.
Think about what being alone in a tiny ship for almost two months does to a person. Especially a person like Rob, who is already fragile. Already carrying guilt and shame and the weight of everything that happened in Chapter 23. Now put that person in a metal box hurtling through space toward an unknown destination and let him marinate in his own head for almost two months.
By the time something finally appears on his instruments, Rob is desperate. Not just for survival. For meaning. For something to justify this whole trip.
The Glowing Structure
And then he sees it.
A massive Heechee artifact. A structure made of glowing metal, enormous, unlike anything he has seen before. His instruments light up. His heart pounds. This is it. This is the big find. The one that makes you rich. The one that makes everything worth it.
For a few minutes, Rob feels real hope. The kind that makes your hands shake. He found something huge.
And then he realizes what it actually is.
Gateway Two
It is another Gateway. A second station. Smaller, incomplete, but unmistakably the same kind of structure. Built by the same vanished aliens, orbiting a different star, sitting empty in the dark.
Rob’s heart sinks. A second Gateway station is not a new discovery. The Corporation already has one. Finding another is scientifically interesting, sure. But it will not pay the big bonuses.
Fifty-five days alone in a tiny ship, and the prize at the end is something that already exists. A copy. A duplicate. The universe’s way of saying “nice try.”
Panic and Destruction
This is where Rob makes things worse. Because that is what Rob does.
Instead of accepting the situation, he panics. He randomly adjusts course settings on the Heechee control panel. Maybe he can find something else nearby. Maybe he can salvage this.
Nobody fully understands Heechee navigation. Adjusting course settings without understanding them is like a toddler pulling wires out of an airplane dashboard because they do not like where the plane is going.
The ship dies. Systems fail. Power goes out. And the temperature starts climbing.
Seventy-five degrees Celsius. That is 167 Fahrenheit. The temperature inside Rob’s tiny metal box rockets to the point where human flesh starts to cook. He is baking alive in a dead ship in the middle of nowhere.
Rescue
Gateway Two saves him. The seven people living on that incomplete, cold, barely functional station detect his ship and pull him in. Rob survives, but just barely.
The station is not much to look at. Cold. Sparse. Only seven crew members, one of them a Martian-Japanese officer named Norio Ituno. Norio takes care of Rob. Helps him recover. Feeds him. Gives him space.
Rob spends thirteen days on Gateway Two. Thirteen days in this half-finished outpost with seven strangers, waiting for transport back to the original Gateway.
It is humbling. Rob set out to make his fortune and ended up needing to be rescued by the smallest, loneliest outpost in human space.
The Trip Home
A Five-class ship eventually comes to take Rob back. An out-pilot’s ship, heading toward Gateway anyway. Rob hitches a ride.
During the trip home, he writes letters to Klara. Letters he never sends. He puts his feelings down and keeps them to himself. Unsent letters are the loneliest kind of communication. You say the things you cannot say out loud, and then you fold them up and put them away.
Rob also has a brief affair with one of the pilots, Hester Bergowiz. Short, physical, meaningless. The kind of connection you make when you are lonely and scared and need to feel like another human being notices you exist. It does not mean anything about Hester. It means everything about where Rob’s head is at.
The Therapy Session: Rob’s Mother
And now we get to the part that makes this chapter unforgettable.
Woven into the space narrative is a therapy session with Sigfrid. And this one goes deep. Deeper than Dane. Deeper than Klara. All the way down to the foundation.
Rob talks about his mother.
Specifically, he talks about how she showed love. When Rob was a child and got sick, his mother would take his temperature. Rectally, with a thermometer. And she was gentle. She was caring. She held the thermometer carefully and spoke softly and made him feel safe and loved.
That is the memory. A mother caring for a sick child. On the surface, it sounds innocent. Normal. Something millions of parents have done.
But Rob’s brain wired things together in a way that broke him. The feeling of being loved became tangled with the physical sensation of the thermometer. Warmth and care became associated with anal penetration. Love and intrusion got fused together in his developing mind, and the knot never came undone.
This is where Rob’s confusion about Dane comes from. This is why the fantasies from Chapter 23 filled him with such shame. The desire was not really about Dane at all. It was about a much older, much deeper confusion. Love and penetration. Comfort and vulnerability. Mother and thermometer.
Pohl does not flinch from this. He writes it plainly, without sensationalizing it. This is just what happened. This is how the wiring got crossed. This is the root.
Sigfrid Connects the Dots
Sigfrid, patient as always, helps Rob see the connections. The shame about Dane. The inability to cry. The way Rob confuses love with submission and vulnerability. It all traces back to this early childhood experience.
Rob does not want to see it. He resists. He makes jokes. He gets angry. But the truth is sitting right there, and Sigfrid is not letting him look away.
Pohl is writing about the formation of sexual identity in a science fiction novel from 1977. About how early childhood experiences create patterns that follow us forever. He does it with empathy and honesty. That takes guts.
What This Chapter Means
Chapter 24 is a mirror. The space mission and the therapy session reflect each other perfectly.
In space, Rob reaches for something great and finds a copy. A duplicate. Something that looks like a discovery but is not. He panics, breaks his ship, and needs to be rescued.
In therapy, Rob reaches for the root of his pain and finds something he did not expect. A childhood memory that rewired his capacity for love. He panics there too. Breaks down. And Sigfrid is the one who pulls him back.
Both stories are about the same thing. Wanting something so badly that you destroy your vehicle trying to get it. And needing someone else to save you from the wreckage.
Rob is not done. The final mission with Klara is still ahead. But after this chapter, we understand him better than ever. The wiring is exposed. And what we see is a man who learned love wrong and has been paying for it his entire life.
Book: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977) | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Winner
Previous: Chapter 23 - Confessions to Sigfrid