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.

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.

The Rumi had picked up the Terran craft also, because even as I watched one of the alien cruisers peeled off and headed toward it. The Terran craft was aware of its danger now and had changed course and was heading directly toward the Nestrond system.

My eyes glued to the spacescope I watched as the two ships came within visual range. The long black Rumi cruiser with its bulging blaster turrets was closing in quickly on a small Terran Crossley 18 of a type used mostly for private yachts. I watched as the Terran ship went into what must have been a body wracking turn in a desperate attempt to throw off the cruiser. The pilot of the Crossley was good but not good enough. A disruptor beam from the raider caught the Earth ship in the port tubes and it fell away spiraling into the gravity of Thirty, with flames engulfing its after portion as it reached atmosphere.

With only a few hundred feet to spare the damaged spacer pulled out of its fall with a flare of landing rockets, slowly leveled off into a wobbly glide and headed for a fairly level plateau about twenty miles from my bunker. Then the Rumi ship was coming back, orbiting just outside atmosphere and finally plunging into it to pass over my concealed post with the heavy beat of ion rockets. The big ship filled my whole vision screen for a few moments and I would have given my ears for a pair of six-inch blasters in turret mounting. But I didn’t even have as much as a sidearm; Watchers were supposed to watch and warn, not fight.

The raider swept across the bow of the crippled Terran ship and poured everything she had into it at point blank range. I could see that she had been holed repeatedly but was still not finished, she had a pair of jets in action and someone at the controls who knew his business. The one thing that the automatics can’t do is to set a spacer down in one piece; the intricate business of landing takes a pilot, not exactly a superman but the closest thing to homo superior in reflexes and know-how you could find. And setting a damaged ship down on a pillar of fire with only half your jets in action just can’t be done. The guy in this ship came close, though. He was at tree top level now, shaving off trees like blades of grass and splashing flame about like a Martian fire dancer, fighting the ship all the way. He just couldn’t keep her level and the ship nosed over and smashed itself into a ball of smoke and flame in a dry river bed. The odds against anyone surviving that crack-up seemed overwhelming but with my scanner trained for close range I thought I saw a space-suited figure stumble, fall and then crawl away from the ship just before the fuel tanks let go with a blast that shook every instrument in my station.

The raider had swung up out of Thirty’s atmosphere and was turning its nose outward but it had launched a life boat which was circling down for a landing. Those cat-faced devils never miss a trick. That landing force was to make sure that no one had survived to send a possible warning.

If those catmen thought someone had survived that crash, maybe I thought so too. My orders were very specific about not leaving my bunker and about not taking any chances of my whereabouts being discovered but something within me was just as specific about not leaving an injured human being to the Rumi’s none too tender mercies. In a matter of minutes I was into my outer clothing and hurrying up the ramp from my bunker.

The cold on Thirty was unlike the cold anyplace else. It seemed to have the ability to seep its way through the thickest clothing or the stoutest walls. Even hurrying as I was through the gathering hoar frost, I could feel it creeping into my flesh. I hoped fervently that I would be back in the warmth of the bunker by the time the sun set because then it really got cold.

To travel a mile on Thirty you have to climb twenty up and down. It was hard going all the way and my breath was coming in heavy, gasping pants by the time I reached a ledge over the dry river bed in which the wrecked spacer lay. It took me only one look to see that I was too late. Beside the twisted mass of the ship sat a small gleaming object, the spaceboat from the Rumi cruiser. Six of the raiders were gathered about the space-suited figure of a human being. In a few minutes they would either have loaded the injured person into their ship and taken off or they would have done away with him. My first thought was to try to get to their ship but since it lay only a few hundred feet away from where they stood that was impossible. If I only had some sort of weapon, I thought, I would be in an ideal spot to pick them off one by one. The closest I could come to a weapon was a small pocket magnesium flare for signalling purposes.

If I was to do anything before it was too late I realized that I would have to get closer. Dropping down on my stomach, I began to crawl inch by inch down among the rocks and scrub growth toward where the Rumi were busying themselves over the supine human figure.

After ten minutes of crawling and slithering through underbrush that ripped my clothing and scratched me badly about the face, I had worked my way to within twenty feet of the Rumi. I had been careful to keep downwind of them for I wasn’t sure how strong their animal sense of smell was. Certainly the musty odor of them floated down on the wind so strongly that I could make my way around them without having to risk looking until I reached what I took to be a safe spot in a clump of brush on the bank of the river almost above their heads.

When I did look I saw that the Rumi had finished taking the spacesuit off the prisoner and had gotten her—for the survivor of the Terran yacht was a girl—to her feet. Behind them I could see clearly the wreck of the Crossley with the name Star Lady on her bow. Even I had heard of the yacht Star Lady and her owner Charles Thomson, millionaire explorer. Without a doubt the girl was Thomson’s daughter. The Rumi hadn’t killed her immediately so they probably intended to hold her for ransom as they did so many of their prisoners.

The girl was fighting and kicking as two of the raiders dragged her back toward their ship. I knew that if I didn’t act quickly they would have her aboard and far beyond any help I could give her. There was only one thing I could do and that was to delay them until I could think of some way of getting her out of their hands. If they thought there was someone else on the satellite, they might make an attempt to get me too before they left. I shoved with my foot and sent a small avalanche of rocks and gravel down into the river bed. They were after me instantly, three of them bounding along in my direction with their flamers out. By the time they had scrambled up the bank, I was crashing away into the undergrowth and out of sight. Now I knew they wouldn’t leave, not without tracking me down first and I had an idea it would turn out to be quite a job. Even with their catlike ability for following a spoor, I intended to give them a run for their money and if they caught me at least one or two of them might regret it. I knew my satellite and I was confident that my training would give me an advantage over them on its rugged surface. If I could get them to split up, the odds against me might even come down a little.

Running, climbing, crawling, I kept them always upwind of me and always the sickening big cat odor warned me that they weren’t far behind, that big cat odor that anyone who has ever visited a zoo or lion farm is familiar with. Occasionally when I stopped to catch a few breaths I would hear them pounding along tirelessly and I would be on my feet again and plunging ahead.

A few hours before it was time for the sun to set, they split up. We had been crossing one of the few level spots on the planet, a great stretch of grassland. The tall, hardy grass reached almost over my head. The Rumi were a good bit taller than I, so much taller in fact that I could see their heads above the grass when they still could not see me. I watched them split up in an attempt to cut me off from the hills which they took to be my destination. Half an hour after they split up, I killed the first of them and doubled back in the direction of the river bed. Now I had a weapon, one of those deadly Rumi heat rays called flamers. They wear them strapped to their forepaws because of their lack of a grasping hand. As I put on an extra burst of speed I wasn’t much worried about the other two. They had gotten well off the scent in their attempt to head me off and by the time they realized that they had lost me, night would have closed in and I didn’t put much store in the ability of those jungle cats to survive a night on Thirty. There were still three of them left back at the wreck and they would either have returned to their lifeboat or made a camp—I hoped it would be the latter.

My luck was still holding for when I reached the river bed I found them huddled about a fire in the shelter of the wrecked Terran ship. An officer and two others made perfect targets against the firelight but I couldn’t fire because the figure of the girl sat in the circle of light near them. With such an unfamiliar and widely destructive weapon, I would be almost certain to cut her down as well as her captors.

Once more I took advantage of a downwind position to work my way around their camp and in among the wreckage of the Star Lady. The feel of the magnesium flare in my pocket had given me an idea. If I could just panic them and spread them out where the girl wouldn’t be in my line of fire, I would have a good chance of picking them off. As silently as possible I climbed up on what remained of the fore section of the craft and dragged myself to a spot that was almost directly over their heads. In the leaping light of the fire, I looked almost squarely into the narrow, fur-covered faces of the raiders and could also see the pale, pretty face of the girl framed in blond hair. Quietly but with my heart pounding, I edged forward even closer—I had to be close—I couldn’t afford to miss. If any of them looked up now they couldn’t miss seeing me. Slowly I worked the flare out of my pocket and let it roll off the edge of the wreck. An intense white light shot upward temporarily blinding the Rumi. Two of them did just what I had hoped, they stumbled off in the direction of their lifeboat. The officer did what I had hoped they wouldn’t do, he grabbed the girl and pulled her back out of the light.

Even with that strange weapon, I knew I couldn’t miss those two running Rumi. I cut them down with three quick blasts and then slid quickly from the top of the ship as the officer poured a stream of fire at me, fire that splashed and roared over my head. As I fell to the ground, I caught a quick glimpse of the girl. She had broken away from her captor and was darting into the undergrowth. He sent one burst of flame after her and then had to leap for cover as I sent a steady stream of fire in his direction. Then I was running, dodging and twisting behind boulders and rocks and firing as I ran until my gun clicked empty. I cursed myself for having forgotten to take the extra clips of ammo from the creature I had killed. As my quarry almost got my range, I plunged headlong into some brush and lay for a minute getting my bearings in the rapidly fading light from the flare. Carefully now and with more deliberate air, the Rumi tried to burn me. As quietly as I could I moved toward him in the heavy undergrowth. The light was almost gone and I didn’t think that even his cat eyes would be much good in the ebony dark Thirty night. I could smell him, clearly in my nose was that musty smell and no matter how still he might lie or how silently he might creep about on those padded feet of his, I could follow him. I stalked him in the darkness and he knew he was being stalked. He blazed away at every shadow, at every bush that moved in the cold wind that whistled along the river bed.

He was afraid now and his scent was stronger. Then he was running, trying to get to the lifeboat and I was after him. He was stumbling and sobbing now, occasionally turning to fire back along the way he had come. But I had already bounded around ahead of him and was coming in to attack. He turned, his paw with the flamer darting upward. He was quick but not quick enough. My hurtling body struck him before the gun could fire and we went down in a struggling heap. The Rumi rolled over trying to regain his feet but he couldn’t break my grip. The heat gun had fallen into the undergrowth and he was trying desperately to recover it and to fight me off at the same time. Unable to find the gun he turned his full attention to me.

We fought body to body, the musky smell of him almost choking me at such close quarters. At the same time it sent a hot flood of rage surging through me. He clawed vainly for the knife in his belt. He was big and had the muscles of a wildcat but he had evolved too far up the scale of evolution for a battle of fang and claw. I found his throat and he screamed wildly like the big jungle cats his ancestors had been, screamed and thrashed about until I found his jugular vein. Then he lay still and his cat blood was all over me.

A few hours later I found the girl. She had been running in circles for hours and had finally settled down near a small fire she had started with a Rumi flamer. She was all hunched over with her arms wrapped about her as I stepped out into the circle of light. I came as near to dying then as I had at any time that night.

Miss Thomson screamed at first sight of me and her heat gun leaped upward. I saw her finger tighten on the firing pin—then she relaxed and ran toward me.

“Thank God! You’re not a raider, are you? Come here, doggie! Nice doggie!”

I nuzzled her hand as she patted my head. Later I might tell her that I came from a race of mutant dogs with I.Q.’s in the 200’s, developed by man to aid him in guarding the far boundaries of his space frontiers ... later I might tell her all about the watchdogs of space ... but right now I felt like having my ears scratched.