Gateway (novel) - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Gateway is a space station built into a hollow asteroid (or perhaps the dead heart of a comet) constructed by the Heechee, a long-vanished alien race. Humans have had limited success understanding Heechee technology, although the promise is enormous and Gateway is a highly sought-after destination for many researchers.

Notable among the abandoned technology are nearly a thousand small starships. Unable to understand how they work, a small level of functionality has been recovered simply by trial and error. Occasional attempts at reverse engineering to find out how they work have ended only in disaster. The controls for selecting a destination have been identified, but nobody knows where a particular setting will take the ship or how long the trip will last - starvation is a major danger. Once in flight, no one who has changed the settings has ever been heard from again. Most settings take the ship to useless or lethal places. A few, however, lead to Heechee artifacts and habitable planets, making the passengers (and the Gateway Corporation, which administers the asteroid on behalf of a cartel of countries) wealthy.

The vessels come in three standard sizes, which can hold a maximum of one, three, or five people, crammed in with equipment and (hopefully) enough food to last the trip. A small fraction of "threes" and many "fives" are armored, thus suitable for missions anticipated to be especially hazardous. Each ship includes a lander to visit a planet or other object if one is found.

Robinette Stetley Broadhead—known as Robin, Rob, Robbie, or Bob, depending on circumstances and his state of mind—is a young food shale miner on Earth who has won a lottery, giving him just enough money to purchase a one-way ticket to Gateway. Once there, he loses his nerve, putting off going on a mission as long as he can. Eventually he starts running out of money, and although he is terrified, he goes out on three trips. The first draws a blank. On the second, he makes a discovery through unauthorized experimentation, but this is balanced by the fact that he has to pay a hefty penalty for the ship he managed to incapacitate in the process.

On his third trip, the Gateway Corporation tries something different: sending two five-person ships, one slightly behind the other, to the same destination. Bob signs up in desperation, along with Gelle-Klara Moynlin, a woman he had gradually come to love on Gateway, and who was struggling with her own fears. 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—to cram all the people into one ship and eject the other toward the black hole, thus gaining enough velocity to escape. Working frantically to transfer unnecessary equipment to make room, Bob finds himself stuck alone in the wrong ship when time runs out, so he attempts to sacrifice himself and closes the hatch. However, his ship is the one thrown away, leaving the rest of the crew falling into the black hole.

He returns to Gateway and becomes wealthy when, as the sole "survivor", he receives the bonuses for the entire group. He feels enormous survivor guilt for deserting his crewmates, especially Klara, so he seeks therapy from an Artificial Intelligence Freudian therapist program which he names Sigfrid von Shrink. He finally comes to terms with his guilt despite the realization that, due to the gravitational time dilation resulting from proximity to the black hole, time is passing much more slowly for his former crew mates and none of them have actually died yet, leaving him with the dread that Gelle-Klara believes he betrayed them to save himself.

The novel is divided between chapters of dialogue between Bob and Sigfrid and chapters covering the main action. Also embedded are various mission reports (usually with fatalities), technical bulletins, and other documents Broadhead might have read, adding to the verisimilitude of the narrative.