Gateway Chapter 29: Time, Gravity, and the Truth Rob Can't Escape
This is it. The chapter everything has been building toward. Twenty-eight chapters of dodging, deflecting, joking, and screaming. Twenty-eight chapters of Sigfrid waiting. And now Rob finally arrives at the place he has been running from since the first page.
Sigfrid clears his entire schedule for this session. No time limit. No other patients. Just Rob and the machine, for as long as it takes.
That alone tells you something. Even an AI therapist knows when the moment has arrived.
The Physics Lesson
Rob does not start with the trauma. Of course he does not. He starts with physics.
He talks about singularities. Black holes. The way gravity works at the extreme end of the scale. He explains how a black hole bends space and time so severely that at a certain distance, nothing can escape. Not light. Not matter. Not even information. That distance is called the event horizon. Cross it, and you are gone. No coming back. No rescue. No communication.
Rob knows this stuff. He knows it the way you know things that almost killed you. Not from a textbook. From experience. The words come out clean and precise, like a lecture. But his hands are shaking.
He is using physics to approach the personal. Using equations and terminology as a path toward the thing he cannot say directly. This is classic Rob. He puts a wall of knowledge between himself and his feelings, then talks through the wall instead of over it.
Sigfrid lets him do it. Sometimes the indirect route is the only route.
Time Dilation
Here is where the physics gets personal.
Rob explains what happened to time near the black hole. When their two ships approached the singularity, time slowed down for them. A lot. Fifteen minutes inside the ship was almost a year outside.
Think about that. You sit in a tiny Heechee ship for what feels like a quarter of an hour. You are terrified. You are watching your instruments go crazy. You are trying to figure out if you are going to live or die. And when you finally get out, almost a year has passed. Everyone who was waiting for you has already mourned you. The flowers on your desk have died and been replaced and died again.
Time dilation is not science fiction. It is real physics. Einstein proved it. GPS satellites have to account for it. But experiencing it, actually living through it at the edge of a black hole, is something else entirely.
Rob and his crewmates lost a year. They did not feel it pass. They did not age through it. But it happened. The universe kept going while they were stuck in a gravity well, living fifteen minutes that took twelve months.
The Schwarzschild Discontinuity
Rob uses this term. The Schwarzschild discontinuity. It is another way to talk about the point of no return. The boundary where the gravitational pull becomes absolute.
He describes what it felt like to approach it. The terror. The certainty that they were going to be trapped forever. Not dead, exactly. Worse. Falling endlessly into a gravity well that gets deeper and deeper, stretching your body and your ship into a thin stream of particles, conscious or not, for eternity.
That is the nightmare. Not death. Death is quick. This is forever.
Rob’s voice changes when he talks about this. Pohl does not tell us directly, but you can feel it in the prose. The sentences get shorter. The explanations get more fragmented. He is reliving it. Not remembering it. Reliving it.
Rob Breaks Down
And then it happens.
Rob cries. For real. For the first time in the entire book.
We have watched this man scream. We have watched him throw things. We have watched him rage and deflect and deny and joke. But we have never seen him cry. Sigfrid has been noting it for chapters. The inability to cry. The locked-up grief. The emotional constipation that no amount of talking could fix.
Now the tears come. Hard. Ugly. The kind of crying that takes your whole body. The kind where you cannot breathe properly and your chest hurts and snot runs down your face and you do not care because something is finally coming out that has been trapped inside you for years.
Rob cries and cries and cries.
Sigfrid says nothing. Just lets it happen. The machine knows that this is not the time for questions. This is the time for silence.
The Hologram
After the crying subsides, Sigfrid shows Rob something. A holographic reconstruction of what happened near SAG YY.
Two Five-class ships. Floating near a black hole. Small and fragile against the impossible darkness of a singularity.
The image is clinical. Scientific. It is the kind of thing the Corporation would use in a briefing. But for Rob, it is a photograph of the worst moment of his life. He is looking at himself. At the ship he was in. At the other ship. At the geometry of his destruction.
The expedition earned a ten million dollar science bonus. The data they brought back was enormously valuable. The Corporation was thrilled. The scientific community was thrilled. Rob got rich.
He got rich from the worst thing that ever happened to him.
The Impossible Math
Here is the core of it. The thing Rob has been circling for twenty-nine chapters.
The two ships were trapped. The gravity well was pulling them in. They did not have enough fuel or momentum to escape as a unit. Both ships together could not make it out.
But one ship could.
If they transferred fuel and momentum between the ships and landers, they could push one ship deeper into the gravity well. The ship going deeper would act as a kind of anchor, its descent providing the force needed to push the other ship out. Conservation of momentum. Basic physics. Beautiful, elegant, terrible physics.
One ship escapes. One ship falls in.
Nine people between two ships. And only one ship gets to leave.
This is the choice. This is what Pohl has been building toward. Not a monster. Not an alien threat. Not a war. Just math. Just physics. Just the cold, indifferent logic of gravity and momentum and the fact that the universe does not care about fairness.
Someone has to fall in so someone else can escape. That is the equation. There is no other answer.
What This Means
For twenty-nine chapters, Rob has been telling us that he did something terrible. That he murdered someone. That he is guilty. That he cannot live with what happened.
And now we know the shape of it. Not the details yet. Not the specific moment. But the shape. Two ships. One escapes. One does not. Rob is alive and rich and broken, which means he was on the ship that escaped.
Which means someone he loved was on the ship that did not.
Sigfrid has been waiting for this moment since Chapter 1. The machine finally has the full picture. Or close to it. The physics, the time dilation, the impossible choice. The reason Rob cannot sleep. The reason he cannot stop paying for therapy. The reason he screams in sessions and then goes to guitar lessons like nothing happened.
Rob was given a choice between his life and someone else’s. And he chose his.
Or did he? We do not know the details yet. We do not know who decided. Who acted. Who pressed the button. We just know the math. And the math is merciless.
Chapter 30 is next. And now, finally, there is nowhere left to hide.
Book: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977) | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Winner
Previous: Chapter 28 - Into the Black Hole