He asked the instructor to explain one reading, listened, and compared it with the physical symptoms. The display turned out to be helpful, not authoritative. It narrowed the possibilities but did not substitute for his own verification. Owen found the fault, documented his reasoning, and completed the exercise safely, though not in record time.
"Good," the instructor said. "Now tell me what you would do if the reading and your observations disagreed."
Owen considered it. "Check whether I'm measuring the thing I think I'm measuring. Then check the measurement again. If they still disagree, stop pretending one of them has to be right just because I like it."
The instructor smiled and wrote a note on the evaluation form. Owen could not see what it said. He did not need to; he already knew he had given the best answer he had.
Another exercise went badly. He hurried through the setup, misread a specification, and had to backtrack after discovering that his initial assumption did not fit the evidence. His face heated with embarrassment while other candidates continued working. For a moment he heard the crowd at the Iron Rail again, the chant about crawling, the laughter when his tools scattered.
Then he remembered something Thomas had said after a mistake on an old generator. A mistake was tuition if you paid attention afterward. Owen raised his hand, explained what had happened, and asked to repeat the setup under supervision. The instructor allowed it and noted that recognizing an error before it damaged anything was an important part of good practice.
Eleanor met him afterward in the cafeteria. He told her about the exercise he had failed, leaving out the others because the failure felt more urgent. She listened to the details and asked what he had changed on the second attempt. Owen described the corrected process and then, only after finishing, realized he had already explained the reason the first attempt mattered.
"You didn't fail by finding something you didn't know," she said. "You would have failed by refusing to learn it. That's the whole purpose of bringing you here. Nobody needs another man so terrified of being wrong that he starts lying to himself."
The words stayed with Owen through the return trip. He thought about Garrett, whose anger had made a simple mechanical problem into a public contest over superiority, and about Curtis, whose confidence had outrun his evidence. He thought about himself at the bench, embarrassed by one error despite knowing intellectually that no person was right all the time. The differences between them were not as simple as he had wanted to believe while everybody was applauding.