The Perfect Host by Theodore Sturgeon Page B

their orbits without power, except for an occasional automatic correction-kick. They could operate without servicing for years. It was assumed that by the time they needed servicing, astrogation would have developed to the point where they could be refueled—and recharged—by man-carrying ships. If technology did not solve the problem, little harm could be done by the silent, circling machines; when, at long last, they slipped from their arbitrary orbits and spiraled in to crash, so many years would have passed that the question was, momently, academic.
    And even before the twenty-seventh satellite was launched, factories were retooling for a long dreamed of project, a space station which would circle the Earth in an orbit close enough to be reached by man-carrying rockets, which would rest and refuel there and take off again for deep space without the crushing drag of Earth’s gravity.
    The third Outsider took up its position, as Dr. Simmons had prophesied, equidistant from the others with Earth in the center, rolling nakedly under them. As in the case of the arrivals of the other two, there was no sign of its presence but the increasing sound on the sixty-megacycle band. Radar failed utterly to locate it until, suddenly, it was in its position—a third blur against the distant stars, a third indeterminate, fifteen-hundred-foot shape on the radarscopes.
    The Board of Strategy was happily, almost gleefully, busy again. Their earlier work within the field of the probability of human works faded to insignificance against the probabilities inherent in the Attack. There was another major difference, too: they came out in the open. They plastered the world with warnings, cautions, and notices, many of them with no more backing than vivid imaginings of some early science-fiction writer—plus probability. Although logic indicated that the first blows would be in the form of self-guided missiles, thousands of other possibilities were considered. Spy rays, for example; radio hams the world over were asked to keep winding coils, keep searching the spectrum for any unusual frequencies. Telepathicamplifiers, for another example; asylums were circularized for any radical changes in the quality and quantity of insanity and even abnormal conduct. The literary critics were called in to watch for any trends in creative writing which seemed to have an inhuman content. Music was watched the same way, as were the graphic arts. Farmers and fire wardens were urgently counseled to watch for any plant life, particularly predatory or prehensile or drug-bearing plant life, which might develop. Sociologists were dragged from their almost drunken surveys of this remarkable turn of social evolution, and were ordered right back into it again, to try to extrapolate something harmful to come from this functional, logical, unified planet. But only the nationalists found harm, and they were—well, unfashionable.
    The bombs came about a month after the third Outsider took up his post.
    The whole world watched. Everything stopped. Every television screen pictured radarscopes and the whip-voiced announcer at Planetary Defense Central in Geneva, which had at long last regained its place as a world center.
    The images showed Outsiders A, B, and C in rapid succession. So well synchronized was the action that the three images could have been superimposed, and would have seemed like one picture. Each ship launched two bombs; of each two, one turned lazily toward Earth and the other hovered.
    “Out of range of the satellites,” said the announcer. “We shall have to wait. The satellites will detect the bombs when they are within two hundred miles, and will then launch their interceptors. Our Earth-based rockets are aiming now.”
    There was a forty-minute wait. Neighbor called neighbor; illuminated news banners on the sides of buildings gave the dreaded news. Buses and trains stopped while their passengers and crews flocked to televisors. There was a hushed