Those who choose to risk their lives cram the limited space with equipment and hopefully enough food for the trip, but sometimes it is not enough, and they have to resort first to cannibalism, and if that is not enough, to suicide.

Robinette Stetley Broadhead is a young food shale miner who wins a lottery, giving him enough money to purchase a one-way ticket to Gateway.

He is awarded a sizable bonus because his route saves about 100 days of travel time; the windfall is partially offset by the large penalty for incapacitating his ship.

On his third trip, the Gateway Corporation tries something different – sending two armored fives, one slightly behind the other, to the same destination, one rejected by most ships' computers; each crewmember is promised a million-dollar bonus.

When the ships arrive, their crews find to their horror that they are in the gravitational grip of a black hole without enough power to break free.

He feels such enormous survivor guilt for dooming his crewmates, especially Klara, that he suppresses his memories of what happened, but he is very disturbed and miserable, though he does not understand why, so back on Earth as a wealthy man, he seeks therapy from an artificial intelligence Freudian therapist program, which he names Sigfrid von Shrink.

Also embedded in the narrative are various mission reports (usually with fatalities), roster openings, technical bulletins, and other documents Broadhead might have read on Gateway, adding to the verisimilitude.

"[7] In 2015 Variety announced that a Gateway TV series was going to be written and produced by David Eick and Josh Pate for Syfy, although it failed to enter production.

[9] In 2017 Skybound Entertainment made an agreement with the Pohl estate for another attempt at making a TV series but it failed to begin production as well.