blackness he
took a reading, made a mark.

Then he took a fore-and-aft measurement from a point opposite the
forward end of the table to one opposite the after end of the bunk.
Working carefully, he knelt and constructed a perpendicular to this
line. He put the tape down for the third time, arriving again at the
outboard wall of darkness. He stood regarding it thoughtfully, and then
unhesitatingly plunged his arm into it. He fumbled for a moment, moving
his hand around in a circle, pressing forward, trying again. Suddenly
there was a click, a faint hum. He stepped back.

Something huge shouldered out of the dark. It pressed forward toward
him, passed him, stopped moving.

It was the port.

Hoskins wiped sweat away from his upper lip and stood blinking into the
airlock until the outer port opened as well. Warm afternoon sunlight and
a soft, fresh breeze poured in. In the wind was birdsong and the smell
of growing things. Hoskins gazed into it, his mild eyes misty. Then he
turned back to the cabin.

The darkness was gone. Ives was sprawled on the after couch, apparently
unconscious. Johnny was smiling in his sleep. The Captain was snoring
stertorously, and Paresi was curled up like a cat on the floor. The
sunlight streamed in through the forward viewports. The manual wheel
gleamed on the bulkhead, unbroken.

Hoskins looked at the sleeping crew and shook his head, half-smiling.
Then he stepped to the control console and lifted a microphone from its
hook. He began to speak softly into it in his gentle, unimpressive
voice. He said:

"Reality is what it is, and not what it seems to be. What it seems to be
is an individual matter, and even in the individual it varies
constantly. If that's a truism, it's still the truth, as true as the
fact that this ship cannot fail. The course of events after our landing
would have been profoundly different if we had unanimously accepted the
thing we knew to be true. But none of us need feel guilty on that score.
We are not conditioned to deny the evidence of our senses.

"What the natives of this planet have done is, at base, simple and
straightforward. They had to know if the race who built this ship could
do so because they were psychologically sound (and therefore capable of
reasoning out the building process, among many, many other things) or
whether we were merely mechanically apt. To find this out, they tested
us. They tested us the way we test steel--to find out its break