"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."

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sword, by Frank Quattrocchi

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