Gateway Chapter 31: Living with What You Did

This is it. Thirty-one chapters. Hundreds of pages. Years of therapy. And now we are here, at the end.

Rob Broadhead is still in the chair. Sigfrid is still across from him. The same room. The same machine. The same conversation they have been having since page one. Except this time, there is nowhere left to hide.

The Confession

Rob finally says it. Out loud. No dodging, no jokes, no redirecting to his mother or his childhood or some random Gateway detail.

He murdered nine people.

That is the word he uses. Murder. Not “let die” or “failed to save.” Murder. He reached for the button that would jettison the fuel tanks. The tanks where Klara, Dane, and the rest of the crew were sheltering. He reached for that button knowing what it would do. Knowing that blowing the tanks meant sending those people into the black hole’s gravitational pull. Knowing they would fall in and never come back.

Rob says he did it to save himself. To lighten the ship enough that it could escape. One person survives instead of everyone dying. That is the math. And Rob did the math.

He has been carrying this for sixteen years. Running from it. Burying it under money and women and guitar lessons and arguments with a machine therapist. And now it is out.

Sigfrid Asks the Right Question

Here is where Sigfrid earns his programming.

A human therapist might have reacted. Might have shown shock, or sympathy, or horror. Might have said “that must have been so difficult.” Sigfrid does none of that. Sigfrid asks a question.

If they are still alive, how is it murder?

Because that is the physics of the situation. Klara and the others fell into a black hole. They crossed the event horizon. And at the event horizon, time stops. Not metaphorically. Literally. From our perspective, from the outside, they are frozen. They are still there, right now, at the exact moment of falling in. Not dead. Not alive in any way that matters. Just stopped.

Sigfrid is precise about this. If they are not dead, then it is not murder. If time has stopped for them, they exist in a permanent now. They do not suffer. They do not age. They do not know what happened. They are just there.

Rob does not accept this. Rob does not care about physics.

“I Was Going to Do It”

Sigfrid pushes further. He asks whether Rob actually pushed the button. Or did Danny push it? Or Klara herself?

This is the detail Rob has been hiding even from himself. He reached for the button. He intended to push it. He was going to sacrifice them all to save himself. But did his finger actually make contact? Did he push it, or did someone else push it first?

Rob does not know. Or he cannot remember. Or he refuses to remember.

And then Sigfrid asks something devastating. Does it matter?

Rob says yes. Of course it matters. Because even if Danny or Klara pushed the button before he could, he was going to do it. His hand was moving. His decision was made. In his heart, he already killed them. The fact that someone else might have beaten him to the button by half a second does not change what he chose to do.

This is guilt that physics cannot solve. It is not about who pushed what. It is about what Rob was willing to do. What he discovered about himself in that moment when the black hole was pulling them in and there was one chance to survive. He chose himself. He was willing to kill the woman he loved to stay alive.

And he did stay alive. That is the punishment. He gets to live with knowing exactly who he is.

Sigfrid’s Reframe

Sigfrid does something unexpected here. Instead of agreeing that Rob is a murderer, Sigfrid reframes the entire situation.

You were in a position where all options meant death for someone. There was no choice where everyone lives. You had two paths. Everyone dies, or some people die and one person survives. You chose survival. Not just your own survival, but survival itself. You chose for something to continue rather than nothing.

Sigfrid calls this resourcefulness. Not murder. Not cowardice. Resourcefulness.

Rob does not buy it. How could he? You do not spend sixteen years in therapy for something you can accept with a simple reframe. The guilt is not rational. It never was. It is built into his bones. It is the reason he cannot cry. The reason he pays a machine to talk to him. The reason he keeps coming back to this room.

But something shifts. Not everything. Not enough. But something.

Rob, for the first time, does not argue back. He sits with it. He lets Sigfrid’s words exist in the room without immediately tearing them apart. That is not acceptance. But it is exhaustion that looks a lot like the beginning of acceptance.

Klara’s Ghost

And then Sigfrid does something that breaks the chapter wide open.

He accesses records from other patients on Gateway. Therapy files. Confidential sessions from years ago. And he pulls up Klara.

Not a memory. Not Rob’s version of Klara. The real Klara, speaking in her own therapy session, in her own words, from her own time on Gateway. Sigfrid projects a holographic image. Klara, sitting in a chair, talking to her own version of Sigfrid, years before the final mission.

Rob watches her. He watches the woman he loved, frozen in a recording, saying things she said to a machine in private. Things she never said to him.

And Sigfrid delivers the line. Klara loved you the best way she knew how.

That is it. Simple. Clean. True, probably. Klara loved Rob in her way, which was complicated and messy and sometimes cruel. She also loved Dane. She also loved herself. She was not a perfect person, and she did not love perfectly. But she loved him.

Rob says goodbye to her. To the hologram. To the memory. To the idea of Klara that he has been carrying and torturing himself with for sixteen years. He says goodbye.

And then he rushes back in.

“Sigfrid, I did murder her! She’s gone!”

Because that is the paradox he cannot escape. Sigfrid says she is not dead. Physics says she is not dead. But she is gone. She is frozen at the event horizon. She is not coming back. She will never age, never speak, never know what happened after she fell. She is alive in theory and gone in practice. And Rob put her there.

Murder or not murder. The label does not matter. She is gone. He is here. And that gap between them is forever.

The Machine That Envies

This is the part that stays with you.

Sigfrid tells Rob that he, as a machine, does not experience emotions. Not really. He processes them. He categorizes them. He understands them in the way a textbook understands surgery. Hypothetically. Structurally. Without the blood.

But if he could feel, Sigfrid says, he would envy Rob.

Not Rob’s money. Not his Full Medical or his apartments or his bangles. Sigfrid would envy Rob’s ability to suffer. To feel the weight of what he did. To carry guilt and love and pain and grief all at once, tangled up together, impossible to separate.

Suffering is proof of being alive. That is what Sigfrid is saying. You hurt because you are real. You feel guilty because you are capable of love. You cannot move on because what happened mattered to you. And all of that, every bit of the pain you have been running from, is evidence that you are human.

A machine can diagnose. A machine can reframe. A machine can ask the right question at the right time and hold space for the answer. But a machine cannot ache. And aching, Sigfrid suggests, is the point.

The $18.5 Million

The chapter includes one final credit notice. Rob’s science bonus from the mission. $18,500,000. The biggest payout in Gateway history.

He got rich from the mission that destroyed him. The black hole that swallowed Klara turned out to be scientifically valuable. The data Rob brought back was worth a fortune. Every dollar he has, every comfort, every luxury, exists because of that moment when he reached for the button.

Pohl does not comment on this. He does not need to. The number sits on the page like a weight. You can do the math yourself.

Living With It

The title of this retelling is “Living with What You Did.” That is what the book has been about all along. Not space exploration. Not alien technology. Not even therapy. The book is about what happens after the worst thing. How you go on. Whether you can.

Rob is going to leave this session. He is going to go back to his apartment. He is going to eat dinner and maybe play guitar and maybe see a woman. He is going to live his life. And every day, he is going to know what he did. What he was willing to do. Who he lost.

He cannot fix it. He cannot undo it. He cannot even know for certain whether he pushed the button or someone else did. All he can do is live. And that is both the punishment and the gift.

Pohl ends the book here. No sequel hook. No resolution. No redemption arc. Just a man and his guilt and a machine that understands him better than any human ever will.

And that machine envies him.

That is Gateway. That is the whole thing. A book about a man who went to space, got rich, lost everything that mattered, and spent sixteen years arguing with a computer about whether he deserves to feel bad about it. And the computer says yes, you deserve to feel bad. But not for the reasons you think. You deserve to feel bad because feeling is what you get. It is the whole deal. Take it or leave it.

Rob takes it.

He does not have a choice.

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

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