"It was simply too obvious for any of us to notice," explained Harrison. "It took that street-corner evangelist to jar something loose--even then it was an accident." "And the rest of us--" started Mills. "While _all_ of us worked on the assumption that the test involved a showing of strength--a flexing of technological muscle." "I still don't see--" "Well, the evangelist put the problem on the right basis. He humbled us, exalted the aliens--that is, he thought the alien was somehow a messenger from God to put us in our places." "We were pretty humble ourselves, especially the last day," protested Mills. "But humble about our _technology_," put in Harrison. "The aliens must be plenty far beyond us technologically. But how about their cultural superiority. Ask yourself how a culture that could produce the ship we've just seen could survive without--well destroying itself." "I still don't understand." "The aliens developed pretty much equally in _all_ directions. They developed force--plenty of it, enough force to kick that big ship through space at the speed of light plus. They must also have learned to control force, to live with it." "Maybe you better stick to the sword business," said Mills. "The sword is the crux of the matter. What did the alien say about the sword? 'It is defective.' It _is_ defective, Bob. Not as an instrument of death. It will kill a man or injure him well enough. "But a sword--or any other instrument of force for that matter--is a terribly ineffectual tool. It was originally designed to act as a tool of social control. Did it--or any subsequent weapon of force--do a good job at that? "As long as man used swords, or gunpowder, or atom bombs, or hydrogen bombs, he was doomed to a fearful anarchy of unsolved problems and dreadful immaturity. "No, the sword is not useful. To fix it--to 'correct that which renders it not useful'--meant to make it something else. Now what in the hell did that mean? What can you do with a sword?" "You mean besides cut a man in two with it," said Mills. "Yes, what can you do with it besides use it as a weapon? Here our street-corner friend referred me to the right place: The bible! "_They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more._ "The aliens just wanted to know if we meant what we said." "Do we?" "We better. It's going to take a hell of a lot more than a silly ploughshare to convince those babies on that ship. But there's more to it than that. The ability of a culture finally to pound all of its swords--its intellectual ones as well as its steel ones--into ploughshares must be some kind of least common denominator for cultures that are headed for the stars."