They picked you out for this Service because your mother and father and their mothers and fathers had been Watchers. The training course was your whole life up to the time you were graduated to the tune of speeches and cheering. Then they pinned a little gold radarscope on your collar and assigned you to your first six months of lonely vigil somewhere away off from everywhere. You ate and you slept and you were bored and you were lonely but you watched. And then one day you weren’t bored anymore. You were excited and maybe just a trifle scared because the keys of the translators were pounding out a report from one of your brood of robots, a report that meant that something was coming in from outside. A fleet of somethings and a fleet could mean only one thing--a Rumi raid. Man had managed to get along with the flying squid from Sirius, with intelligent plants on Varga but never with the Rumi. They were just too much alike. Two races of oxygen-breathing bipeds in one Galaxy were about one too many. This was why I was here on a moon in a deserted system that had been ignored by men until the Space Patrol had learned that Rumi raiders sometimes passed through it on their sporadic raids on the colonial worlds of Wolfe 359. Now they were coming and I had only to wait and watch my radar screens until they were in range, count them and press the red labeled button that activated the hyperwave General Alarm Radio, a radio buried deep in the solid granite of Thirty. A radio which would keep broadcasting even if the Rumi should blast my bunker off the face of the moon and sear it from end to end. Then the Rumi squadron came onto my screen. Man and Rumi had fought a five year war, a war without a fleet action or a general battle. A war of slashing cruiser raids, of surprise and trap. A war of sudden raids in the night, of atomic torpedoes smashing into the hulls of ships, of men dying in suddenly airless compartments. A war of blasted frontier towns and brief, flaming battles over distant worlds. A war of attrition in which the heavy Terran battlefleet could never quite bring its full weight to bear on the light Rumi forces. It was always a city blasted here or a convoy cut to pieces someplace else. Slowly the beeps on the screen drew closer, dividing themselves into half-a-dozen pencil-thin cruiser shapes. With a quick leap across the room I pressed the general alarm stud and started the hyperwave signals on their way. The warnings would alert every Terran cruiser squadron within range and would give the teeming cities of Asgard and Olympia a few hours notice before the disruptor bombs of the Rumi rained down on them. Then, my purpose on Thirty accomplished. I settled back to watch, my excitement fading away; fading away and then suddenly flaring up again as a seventh object came on the screen, an object that showed as a red dot which meant a Terran ship. An unarmed, private craft, for a warship would have shown as orange on the IFF screen.