Gateway Chapter 30: The Button, the Hatch, and the Scream
This is the chapter. The one the entire book has been building toward. Thirty chapters of therapy sessions, of Rob dodging and lying and breaking down, of Sigfrid patiently waiting. All of it was leading here.
And it is worse than you imagined.
The Docking
The two Five-class ships dock. Lander to lander. In panic. In zero gravity near a black hole that is pulling them closer every second.
The plan is clear. Consolidate nine people from two ships into one. The other ship gets jettisoned empty. Its descent into the gravity well provides the thrust the surviving ship needs to escape. Simple physics. Horrible math.
Everyone knows the plan. Everyone is moving.
Dane Metchnikov is adjusting the fuel metering. He rigs it to blow all the hydrogen at once instead of gradually. Maximum acceleration. One shot. Everything they have, in one blast. It is the only way to generate enough force to break free.
This is Dane at his best. The man who went to a nova star and survived. The man who seduced Klara. The man Rob both hated and desired. Right now, none of that matters. Right now, Dane is the engineer who might save their lives.
The Scramble
Nine people. Two ships. One chance.
They scramble. Passing equipment. Passing supplies. Running through hatches and landers, transferring everything that matters into the escape ship. Every second counts. The black hole does not care about their schedule. It is pulling, pulling, pulling, and they are running out of time.
Rob passes Klara. Again and again, moving through the narrow corridors, hauling gear, bumping shoulders. At one point they stop. They kiss. Just once. Quick and desperate and full of everything neither of them can say.
He smells her musk oil perfume. That detail. Of all the things Rob remembers from this moment, he remembers how she smelled. Not the equations. Not the instruments. Not the names of the people around him. Her perfume. The human detail in the middle of the physics.
Pohl knows exactly what he is doing with that detail. He wants you to feel Rob’s love for this woman. He wants it in your nose, in your body, right now, before the next part happens.
The Countdown
Danny A. starts counting.
“Five minutes!”
Everyone moves faster. Hands shaking. Gear sliding in zero gravity. Equipment bouncing off walls.
“Four minutes!”
The panic rises. You can feel it in the prose. The sentences get shorter. The descriptions get choppier. Pohl is matching his writing to their heartbeats.
“Three minutes, get the goddamn lead out!”
Danny A. is not a calm man right now. Nobody is. They are three minutes away from either escape or eternity inside a black hole. Three minutes from life or the worst death imaginable. The one that lasts forever.
Then the final call.
“That’s it! All of you! Come on up here!”
It is time. Everyone needs to be in the escape ship. Now.
The Hatch
Rob hears them. He hears everyone moving. Feet shuffling. Bodies squeezing through corridors. People climbing into the ship that will survive.
But Rob is not with them.
He is blocked. The lander is in his way. He cannot get through the hatch. A duffelbag is jammed in the opening. A stupid, ordinary bag full of somebody’s stuff, wedged in the one doorway that matters more than any doorway has ever mattered.
He tugs at it. It does not move.
He tugs harder. It comes free.
And then he hears Klara.
The Scream
Over the radio. Her voice. Full of terror and love and desperation.
“Rob! Rob, for God’s sake, get up here!”
She is in the other ship. The escape ship. She is calling him. She wants him to come through. She wants him to be safe. She wants him to live.
But Rob knows something. He knows it the way you know things in moments of absolute crisis, when your brain processes faster than words. He knows it is too late. There is no time to climb through the lander, through the hatch, into the other ship. The countdown is done. If he tries, the ships will not separate in time. Everyone dies.
Or maybe that is what he tells himself.
We will never know for sure.
The Choice
Rob slams the hatch shut. He dogs it down. Locks it. Seals it.
Danny A. shouts through the radio. “No! No! Wait…”
And then nothing. Silence. The ships separate.
Rob is in one ship. Klara, Dane, Danny A., and everyone else, all of them, are in the other ship.
Rob’s ship escapes.
Their ship falls into the black hole.
The Weight of It
Read that again. Rob is in the ship that escapes. Everyone he cared about, everyone he traveled with, everyone he shared that mission with, is in the ship that falls into a singularity.
Klara is in that ship. The woman he loved. The woman whose perfume he can still smell on his skin. She is falling into a black hole. Not dying quickly. Not dying at all, maybe, depending on how you understand the physics. Just falling. Forever. Stretched and compressed by gravity. Trapped in a place where time stops making sense.
And Rob? Rob goes home. Rob collects the ten million dollar science bonus. Rob buys an apartment in New York. Rob gets Full Medical and a nice life and guitar lessons and a summer place overlooking the Tappan Sea.
Rob gets everything. And it costs him everything.
The Question That Destroys Him
Here is what has been eating Rob alive for sixteen years. The question he cannot answer. The question Sigfrid has been trying to reach since Chapter 1.
Did he choose?
Was the duffelbag really stuck? Was there really no time? Or did some part of Rob, some survival instinct buried deep below his love and his loyalty, make a calculation? A calculation that said: if I go through that hatch, I might die. If I close it, I live.
Did he sacrifice Klara to save himself?
Rob does not know. That is the horror. He genuinely does not know if he made a choice or if circumstances made it for him. Was it the bag? Was it the timing? Was it the physics? Or was it Rob, in the deepest and ugliest part of himself, choosing his own life over hers?
This is why he cannot sleep. This is why he pays Sigfrid. This is why he screamed “I murdered her twice” back in Chapter 21. Because he does not know if he is a victim of terrible luck or a man who let the woman he loved fall into a black hole to save his own skin.
Both possibilities are unbearable. If it was an accident, then the universe is indifferent and cruel. If it was a choice, then he is a monster. And he has spent sixteen years bouncing between those two options, unable to settle on either one, unable to forgive himself for either one.
What Pohl Built
This chapter is only a few pages long. But it carries the weight of the entire novel.
Every therapy session. Every deflection. Every joke. Every breakdown. Every time Rob changed the subject or yelled at Sigfrid or walked out of the room. All of it was about this. This hatch. This duffelbag. This scream on the radio.
“Rob! Rob, for God’s sake, get up here!”
He hears it every day. He will hear it for the rest of his life.
Pohl wrote a 300-page novel about a man trying not to remember ten seconds. And those ten seconds, when they finally arrive, are more devastating than any alien invasion or space battle could ever be. Because the enemy was never out there. The enemy was always inside Rob, in the space between accident and choice, in the question he will never be able to answer.
This is why Gateway won every major science fiction award in 1978. Not because of the Heechee. Not because of the physics. Because of this chapter. Because of a man, a hatch, and a scream.
Book: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977) | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Winner
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