Gateway (novel)

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Gateway is a 1977 science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl. Gateway won the 1978 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1977 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1978 John W. Campbell Award. It is the opening novel in the Heechee saga. Several sequels followed.

[edit] Plot summary

Gateway is a hollow asteroid, constructed by the Heechee, a long vanished alien race, as a spaceport. It was first discovered by an explorer on Venus, who found a small ship, fiddled with the controls and by accident triggered its return (with him inside) to its home port. Once there, he was unable to figure out how to get back, but before he committed suicide (he would have run out of supplies long before he could be rescued), he was able to signal Gateway's location.

The asteroid contains an irreplaceable treasure: nearly a thousand small starships abandoned there. Most still work, but using them is an insanely dangerous gamble since nobody understands their technology and they cannot be reverse engineered to find out how they are designed. By trial and error, the controls for selecting a destination are eventually identified, but nobody knows where a particular setting will take the passengers or how long the trip will take. Once set, they cannot be changed in flight (without fatal consequences anyway). Most lead to useless places, others to death, and a few to Heechee artifacts, habitable planets or other places that can make the lucky explorers wealthy. Fortunately, the ships return automatically to Gateway. The vessels come in three standard sizes; Ones, Threes and Fives, of which some are armoured. After adding essential equipment and (hopefully) enough supplies, one, three or five people can cram themselves into the remaining space. Each ship is also equipped with a lander, to visit a planet if one is found.

Robinette (Bob) Broadhead is a miner who wins a lottery; the prize money is not enough to set him up for life, but it is enough for a one-way ticket to Gateway. Once there, he puts off going on a mission as long as he can, but eventually he starts running out of money. Although terrified, he goes out on three trips. The first draws a blank. The second's partial success is outweighed by the fact that he manages to destroy the ship in the process. On his third trip, the corporation that owns Gateway wants to try something different: sending two five-person ships, one slightly behind than the other, to the same destination. Bob signs up, along with Gelle-Klara Moynlin, a woman he met on Gateway and fell in love with. When they reach the end of their journey, they find to their horror that they are in the gravitational grip of a black hole, without enough power to break free.

One of the others comes up with a desperate escape plan; if they link the two ships together, then everyone can cram into one of the ships and blow up the attached landers. One ship will be thrown toward the black hole, while the other will gain enough speed to escape. Working frantically to transfer unnecessary equipment to make room for everybody, Bob finds himself alone in the wrong ship when time runs out. He decides to sacrifice himself and closes the hatch. Fortunately or unfortunately, his ship is the one that gets away, leaving the rest of the crew stranded in the other.

He returns to Gateway and becomes wealthy when, as the sole "survivor", he gets paid for the entire group. He feels enormous survivor guilt for "deserting" his crewmates, especially Klara, so he seeks therapy from an Artificial Intelligence psychologist program (which he names Sigfrid von Shrink). He finally conquers his guilt when he realizes that due to their proximity to the black hole and the resulting gravitational time dilation effects, none of them have actually died yet. He then begins a quest for the technology necessary to rescue them.

The novel is divided between chapters of dialogue between Bob and Sigfrid, and chapters covering the main action.

The Heechee saga

Gateway (1977) | Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980) | Heechee Rendezvous (1984) | Annals of the Heechee (1987) | The Boy Who Would Live Forever: A Novel of Gateway (2004)

Short story collections

The Gateway Trip (1990)

Computer games

Frederik Pohl's Gateway (1992) | Gateway 2: Homeworld (1993) view