The Watchers by Jan Smith [Pseudonym of George H. Smith] Many stories have been written about the problems of dealing with alien races, of wars between mankind and bems. But maybe that won’t be a serious problem after all; we’d probably have no use for planets suited to alien life-forms, our troubles may be with life-forms similar to us--oxygen-breathing bipeds, looking for Earth-type planets, like the Rumi. It’s then that we’ll have need for =The Watchers= Man had been happy back in his little two-by-four system. Happy but not contented. So he had invented himself a stellar drive and had burst out of his nice safe little system into a galaxy that he wasn’t really ready for. A galaxy where there just wasn’t enough of him to go around and where other races were on the move, some of them races that also wanted oxygen planets. That’s why there was a Space Frontier Watcher Service--just as if there could be any frontiers in space. Man was spread so wide and far between that sometimes he was only a rumor. But always out on the periphery of his empire was the Watcher Service; The Watchdogs of Space, they called us. That’s why I was sprawled in front of my fire on a tiny hunk of moon they called Thirty which wound its way around a worthless molten planet named Nestrond in a system you probably never heard of on the other side of Wolfe 359. Thirty was a small, jagged planet with just enough gravity to hang on to a breathless atmosphere, the thirtieth out among Nestrond’s huge litter of moons. There were nights on Thirty when the big planet hung overhead like a bloated pumpkin, the bulges in its gaseous mass lending an impossibly grotesque appearance to its face. Sometimes I would watch it as it came peeping over the ragged edge of Thirty; it seemed so close that you held your breath for fear it would puncture itself. There were other nights when Nestrond was eclipsed by clouds of gaseous matter and by the nearer moons and then I’d lie there and listen to the stars whispering--whispering the same age old stories that were always new, the stories that lured man to Luna, then to Mars and finally right out of the Solar System itself. But mostly I watched the screens in my underground bunker, watched the space search radar screens and listened to the robot patrol rockets as they reported back, their mechanical voices reeling off the endless series of numbers that were their only language. Numbers that were punched into cards and fed into interpreters as fast as the information came over the hyperwave radio.