Interstellar Agents

"The Game of Glory" was the first Dominic Flandry story that I read, in the 1960s. I did not yet know that Flandry was a series character. When I learned of Nicholas van Rijn by reading Trader To The Stars, I did not yet know that Flandry and van Rijn were connected although by that time they were. I compared "The Game of Glory" with "Beep," an interstellar secret service story by James Blish. The two stories together suggested the idea of an agent receiving instructions to cross  interstellar distances in order to intervene, briefly but also decisively, in pivotal events on remote planets. However, a device like Blish's Dirac transmitter would have been necessary to enable the agent's controllers to know of pivotal events sufficiently far in advance. Flandry crosses interstellar distances amazingly quickly but can only respond to events as they occur.