The watchers

About The watchers

The watchers by George H. Smith is a science fiction short story written in the mid-20th century. It follows humanity’s frontier surveillance effort as it collides with a rival oxygen-breathing species, focusing on a lone sentinel tasked with detecting and warning of alien raids. The likely topic is the perilous work of space “watchdogs” guarding human colonies from hostile incursions—and the unexpected form those guardians can take. A solitary Watcher stationed on a bleak moon called Thirty spots a Rumi raiding squadron and triggers a hyperwave alarm to warn nearby human worlds. As a Terran yacht, the Star Lady, is shot down and crash-lands on Thirty, the Rumi dispatch a landing party to capture any survivors. Defying orders to stay hidden, the Watcher trails the raiders, uses guile and a captured heat gun to thin their numbers, and snatches the wounded survivor—a young woman—out of their grasp after a night hunt through the rugged terrain. In the closing reveal, the narrator is shown to be a genetically engineered, hyper-intelligent dog—one of humanity’s literal “watchdogs of space,” bred to guard the far frontier.

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