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Synopsis

Adam Blackburn, M.D., had worn a heart monitor, and frequently had to use a relaxer, ever since that fatal day when his knife had slipped in surgery, due to a hear attack, and his famous patient had died. Dr. Blackburn had not been held culpable, but his career with the hospital was overl so he'd been abailable when wealthy Carteret Dunne had approached him to take the post of senior surgeon aboard the Star-Catcher, bound for the Estrella star-system, where they would seek out new life-forms. Now the expedition was on one of Estrella's planets, the watery world Agua, and a native had finally been captured. Dr. Blackburn had just finished installing a think box in the native, Owanda, as Hudson Ivers had cracked the Aguan language and mential communication would be possible.

Previously, he and his assistant, Dr. Lon Mace, has instilled gills in various membes of the expedition so that they could invade the watery world. In fact, Carteret Dunne himself had wanted gills, and his operation had only been completed a day or so before. Dunne could use them now, although Blackburn advised waiting a day or so. Apparently Dunne wanted to be able to go into the tank and talk to Owanda.

Owanda was a lovely creature; all that Blackburn could think of when he looked at her was a water nymph. She was tiny, scarcely four feet tall--a biped adapted for aquatic life. Her webbed feet were in no way deforming; her translucent, delicately green skin gave her an ethereal air, and her long, luxuraint, shimmery hair made her a thing of beauty. Blackburn felt that he was falling in love for the first time in his life.

But he was not alone. Carteret Dunne's interest in being equipped with gills so that he could go into the tank with Owanda was something more than scientific; and Dunne was neither a likable nor ethical person. Blackburn had heard that Dunne had blackmailed just about every member of the expedition into joining-with the possible exception of Captain Petros Roussos. And Dunne had tried to use Blackburn's own accident as a handle to force him to perform an illegal brain operation on the man's alien valet, Nigel.

He tried to speak to Owanda now, but she, was clearly in distress--she was frightened at her state of captivity and her feeling that she had been contaminated by contact with these alien giants. He would try again the next morning. But in the morning, Owanda's distress was even more pronounced. Blackburn went to the tank, to see her swimming around in frantic circles on the far side of the tank, trying to keep away from a dark form on its floor.

Although Adam Blackburn was a good swim- mer, it was exhausting hauling the body out. He turned it over, and looked into the face of a man who could not have drowned--Carteret Dunne!

Was he responsible for another death? It didn't seem possible that anything had gone wrong with Dunne's gills-it was a simple operation and both Blackburn and Mace had made all possible checks, except the one of seeing whether the gills worked. But even so, Dunne could have gotten out of the tank... Unless he'd been held under!

Further examination showed not only that Dunne had been murdered, but the method of murder was known only to two people aboard the Star-Catcher-Lon Mace and Adam Black- burn. And Blackburn knew that Dunne's widow, Enid, hated him as much as she was drawn to his assistant. Unless he could discover how Dunne had been drowned, Adam Blackburn faced a life sentence on frigid Pluto! Here is an absorbing mystery on an alien planet.

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