As Blueprinted, the sky paled and became its normal afternoon azure. The citizens stood hushed, gazing expectantly upwards. After a tense two minutes, the sky suddenly turned black again. This time, however, streaks of blue appeared between the black clots. In a moment, it was seen that the sable hue had been caused by a host of figures, so many they had almost blotted out the blue. It was as if the sky were an upside-down sea out of which dived a thousand bodies, plunging earthward head foremost. A shout of rapture swelled from the ground to meet them. The dead Truncated were descending from Heaven to crown the faithful living! But there was one man who did not scream with joy. He was B. T. Revanche, clad in a white robe and showing a nose from which the plastiflesh had been removed. He was there because he had insisted to Da Vincelleo that he could not get his money's worth unless he actually participated. "You can't taste blood over a TV set," he had growled. So it was that he was the only one of the throng who did not at the next moment fall silent in an amazed numbness. For the falling figures did not carry laurels with which to crown the faithful on the ground. Far from it. They held swords before them--long and broad two-edged blades that flashed ominously in the bright sunlight. A scream of mingled outrage and terror tore the air into tatters. Something was wrong! Somebody had thrown a monkey wrench into the celestial gears! The Blueprint had said nothing about this! The figures swelled in size as they came closer. They slowed their headlong rush, uprighted themselves, and floated feet first to earth. There they paused a minute, glaring about, until the entire army had descended. The multitude looked at the swordsmen, who were close enough to be discerned in detail. They breathed out one marveling and shocked syllable: "X!" Yes, each one of the thousands of descended beings was a replica of X, the entity known in other lands and other tongues by a thousand other names. X was one of his signs, and it was the one chosen by the prophet Dafess to designate the entity because X was an unknown quantity to the pagans. It was X, so wrote the prophet, who had visited Dafess in person and assured that man of wisdom that he alone was being given the monopoly of the sacred teachings. Nor did it matter to the prophet that hundreds of others had made prior claims. He, Dafess, was sure that only his descendants were to be X's heirs on earth until such time as the entity returned. To prove it, they had marched into the wilderness and built this city, and had then written a thousand books to bolster the tradition. "I will carry a sword," X had promised. The Dafesses believed this, but they had been assured by their Elders, who were skilled in reading between the lines, that the sword would be for the Untruncated. The peace would be the Truncateds'.