Explore "The Watchers" by George H. Smith on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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.