_... We are about to land. The planet is green and blue below
us, and the long trip is over.... It looks as if it might be a
pleasant place to live...._
_A fragment of Old Testament verse has been running through my
mind--from Ecclesiastes, I think. I don't remember it verbatim,
but it's something like this:_
_To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose
under heaven: A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to
mourn, and a time to dance; A time to get, and a time to lose; a
time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to be born, and a
time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which
is planted._
_For me, anyway, I feel that the time has come. Perhaps it is
not to die but something else, less final or more terrible._
_In any case, you will remember, I know, what we decided long
ago--that a man owes one of two things to his planet, to his
race: posterity, or himself. I could not contribute the
first--it is only proper that I should offer the second and not
shrink if it is accepted...._
--From a letter by Peter Hoskins to his wife.
In the quiet and the dark, Hoskins moved.
"Checkmate," he said.
He rose from his chair and crossed the cabin. Ignoring what was on the
table, he opened a drawer under the parts cabinet and took out a steel
rule. From a book rack he lifted down a heavy manual. He sat on the end
of the couch with the manual on his knees and leafed through it,
smoothing it open at a page of physical measurements. He glanced at the
floor, across it to the black curtain, back to the one exposed bulkhead.
He grunted, put the book down, and carried his tape to the steel wall.
He anchored one end of it there by flipping the paramagnetic control on
the tape case, and pulled the tape across the room. At the 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 breaking
point. And while they were playing a game for our sanity, I played a
game for our lives. I could not share it with any of you because it was
a game only I, of us all, have experience in. Paresi was right to a
certain degree when he said I had retreated into abstraction--the
abstraction of chess. He was wrong, though, when he concluded I had been
driven to it. You can be quite sure that I did it by choice. It was
simply a matter of translating the contactual evidence into an
equivalent idea-system.
"I learned very rapidly that when they play a game, they abide by the
rules. I know the rules of chess, but I did not know the rules of their
game. They did not give me their rules. They simply permitted me to
convey mine to them.
"I learned a little more slowly that, though their power to reach our
minds is unheard-of in any of the seven galaxies we know about, it still
cannot take and use any but the ideas in the forefront of our
consciousness. In other words, chess was a possibility. They could be
forced to take a sacrificed piece, as well as being forced to lose one
of their own. They extrapolate a sequence beautifully--but they can be
out-thought. So much for that: I beat them at chess. And by confining my
efforts to the chessboard, where I knew the rules and where they
respected them, I was able to keep what we call sanity. Where you were
disturbed because the port disappeared, I was not disturbed because the
disappearance was not chess.
"You're wondering, of course, how they did what they did to us. I don't
know. But I can tell you what they did. They empathize--that is, see
through our eyes, feel with our fingertips--so that they perceive what
we do. Second, they can control those perceptions; hang on a distortion
circuit, as Ives would put it, between the sense organ and the brain.
For example, you'll find all our fingerprints all around the port
control, where, one after the other, we punched the wall and thought we
were punching the button.
"You're wondering, too, what I did to break their hold on us. Well, I
simply believed what I knew to be the truth; that the ship is unharmed
and unchanged. I measured it with a steel tape and it was so. Why didn't
they force me to misread the tape? They would have, if I'd done that
measuring first. At the start they were in the business of turning every
piece of pragmatic evidence into an outright lie. But I outlasted the
test. When they'd finished with their whole arsenal of sensory lies,
they still hadn't broken me. They then turned me loose, like a rat in a
maze, to see if I could find the way out. And again they abided by their
rules. They didn't change the maze when at last I attacked it.
"Let me rephrase what I've done; I feel uncomfortable cast as a
superman. We five pedestrians faced some heavy traffic on a surface
road. You four tried nobly to cross--deaf and blindfolded. You were all
casualties. I was not; and it wasn't because I am stronger or wiser than
you, but only because I stayed on the sidewalk and waited for the light
to change....
"So we won. Now ..."
Hoskins paused to wet his lips. He looked at his shipmates, each in
turn, each for a long, reflective moment. Again his gentle face showed
the half-smile, the small shake of the head. He lifted the mike.
"... In my chess game I offered them a minor piece in order to achieve
a victory, and they accepted. My interpretation is that they want _me_
for further tests. This need not concern you on either of the scores
which occur to you as you hear this. First: The choice is my own. It is
not a difficult one to make. As Paresi once pointed out, I have a high
idealistic quotient. Second: I am, after all, a very minor piece and the
game is a great one. I am convinced that there is no test to which they
can now subject me, and break me, that any one of you cannot pass.
"But you must in no case come tearing after me in a wild and thoughtless
rescue attempt. I neither want that nor need it. And do not judge the
natives severely; we are in no position to do so. I am certain now that
whether I come back or not, these people will make a valuable addition
to the galactic community.
"Good luck, in any case. If the tests shouldn't prove too arduous, I'll
see you again. If not, my only regret is that I shall break up what has
turned out to be, after all, a very effective team. If this happens,
tell my wife the usual things and deliver to her a letter you will find
among my papers. She was long ago reconciled to eventualities.
"Johnny ... the natives will fix your lighter....
"Good luck, good-bye."
Hoskins hung up the microphone. He took a stylus and wrote a line:
"_Hear my recording. Pete._"
And then, bareheaded and unarmed, he stepped through the port, out into
the golden sunshine. Outside he stopped, and for a moment touched his
cheek to the flawless surface of the hull.
He walked down into the valley.