Gateway Chapter 28: The Mission Goes to Hell
This is the chapter where Gateway stops being a psychological novel and becomes a horror story. Not the monster kind. The physics kind. The kind where the universe itself is trying to kill you, and there is no door to run through, no weapon to grab, no hack to deploy.
Just gravity. Infinite, patient, inescapable.
But first, Pohl gives us happiness. Because that is how he operates.
Day Nineteen: The Good Part
The mission has been going for nineteen days. Then turnaround hits. The ship slows, stops, and starts heading in a new direction. The halfway point is passed.
On Gateway missions, turnaround is a big deal. It means you survived the first half. It means the ship is working. The Heechee navigation system has a destination, and that destination is not “the void forever.”
The crew celebrates. For the first time in a long time, everyone is genuinely happy.
Rob does some calculations. They are about 300 light-years from Gateway. Klara’s ship, the one they are chasing, is roughly 17.5 billion kilometers ahead of them. That is an insane distance by human standards. But in space terms, at the speeds they are traveling, it means they are on track. The mission is working.
Dane Metchnikov Opens Up
Here is something beautiful that happens in the middle of all this.
Dane Metchnikov, the quiet, intense scientist who cracked the Heechee color code, relaxes. For the first time in the book, he actually relaxes. The turnaround washed something out of him. The tension, the constant calculation, the tightness in his jaw. It softens.
And he tells Rob something personal. Something nobody on Gateway knew.
Dane is a poet. A real one. Not a hobby poet who writes in a journal. He received a Guggenheim grant for poetry. One of the most prestigious awards in the arts. This man, this scientist who spent his time on Gateway studying alien spectral patterns and probability curves, is also a poet recognized by the most serious literary institution on Earth.
He never told anyone. On Gateway, you do not talk about who you were before. You talk about missions and money and survival. Poetry does not fit.
But now, past turnaround, floating 300 light-years from home, he lets it out. He plans to retire after this mission. Go home. Write poems. Be done with Gateway and its death toll.
It is a small, warm, human moment. Two men sharing a meal of stew, talking about the future like people who believe they have one. Rob and Dane sit close together. There is a physical warmth between them that Pohl describes carefully. Not romantic exactly, but intimate. The kind of closeness that happens when you are far from everything you know and the person next to you is all you have.
This is Pohl setting the trap. He is making you care about Dane. Making you see him as a full person with dreams and plans. Making you picture him at a desk somewhere on Earth, writing poems about stars.
Remember this moment.
The Stew and the Calm
The crew shares stew. They laugh. They talk. The ship hums around them, doing whatever the Heechee programmed it to do millions of years ago. For a few hours, everything is fine.
This is the happiest moment in the book. I am not exaggerating. In a novel full of anxiety and guilt and fear, this is the scene where people are just people. Eating together. Looking forward to tomorrow.
Pohl writes it so gently that you almost forget what kind of book you are reading.
Danny A. Sees Something
Then Danny A. checks the instruments.
He does it casually at first. Routine stuff. Usually boring.
This time the readings are terrifying.
The instruments detect powerful gravitational forces. Not the gentle pull of a star or a planet. Something much stronger. Something that should not be where they are heading.
Danny calls the crew over. On the viewscreen, they see it.
A massive object. Pale blue. Glowing. Not like a star glows, with heat and fire. This glows differently. Colder. Stranger. The light coming off it is Cerenkov radiation, the kind of glow you get when particles move faster than light through a medium. The color of physics breaking down.
SAG YY
Danny recognizes it. He is a physicist. He studied this in textbooks and simulations. But nobody is supposed to see this in person.
It is SAG YY. Sagittarius YY. A rotating singularity. A black hole.
Not a small one. Not a theoretical one from a problem set. A real, massive black hole sitting right in their path, pulling everything toward itself with gravity that bends light and crushes atoms and stops time.
Their ship is caught. The gravity well has them. The Heechee navigation system, whatever it was aiming for, has brought them here. To this.
And Klara’s ship, the one they have been chasing for nineteen days? It is caught too. Already deeper in the gravity well. Already closer to the thing that kills everything.
The Mood Shift
I want you to feel what Pohl does in this chapter. Because it is not just a plot twist. It is an emotional attack.
Five pages ago, Dane was talking about poetry and retirement. Rob was doing math and feeling good about the numbers. The crew was eating stew. Everyone was alive and hopeful and human.
And now they are looking at a black hole.
There is no escape from a black hole. That is literally what makes it a black hole. Once you cross a certain point, nothing gets out. Not light. Not radio signals. Not hope.
The ship is still moving toward it. The Heechee autopilot does not care about the crew. It has a destination. And that destination is a rotating singularity in the Sagittarius arm of the galaxy.
What Makes This Chapter Great
Pohl could have written this as pure action. Ship flies, danger detected, crew panics. Done.
But he does not. He spends half the chapter on stew and poetry and warmth. He makes you like these people. He makes you believe in their future.
Then he takes the future away.
That is not just good writing. That is cruel writing. The kind that only works because the author made you care first. You cannot devastate a reader with a character’s death if the reader does not know the character’s dreams. Pohl made sure you know Dane’s dreams. The Guggenheim. The poetry. The retirement.
And now Dane is falling into a black hole.
The chapter ends with the crew staring at the viewscreen. Blue light. Impossible gravity. No way out. And somewhere ahead of them, Klara’s ship is falling too.
This is where the book has been heading since page one. The therapy, the guilt, the arguments with Sigfrid, Rob’s refusal to face what he did. It all leads here. To this ship. To this black hole. To whatever happens next.
Rob has been running from a memory. And now we are about to see what that memory is made of.
Book: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977) | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Winner
Previous: Chapter 27 - Avoiding the Truth