        They were all weapons, he thought, that was one thing they had in common.  The spears he had seen before.  He had thought, at the time, that they were possibly symbolic, since what advanced race used spears?  As he was hefting the blade in his hand, trying to imagine what it meant, it suddenly hit him.  All three items were weapons, and they were all broken—in the case of the two metal weapons, obviously deliberately broken.  It must mean that they were not interested in violence, since a broken weapon wasn’t useful for anything.  There was a proverb about beating swords into plowshares, and this must be the alien equivalent.  Clearly, they had decided to show him simple weapons, so that he would grasp the meaning.  He supposed that if they had put a broken ray-gun with dead batteries on the beach, he would have had no understanding of what it meant.