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The planet Korwar was a glittering jewel of a world, inhabited by the galaxy's wealthiest, visited by the upper classes of other worlds in search of diversion. The jewel had a flaw: the Dipple, its name coming from a contraction of ''displaced person,'' where the misfits, the hopeless, the penniless eke out a wretched existence on the dole. Two young men hoped to escape from the Dipple:

Troy Horan was deported from his own planet after it lost an interstellar war. When he had a chance to work in an unusual pet shop, offering exotic creatures from other worlds to the wealthy, he though his luck had changed. But the owner was playing a dangerous game of intrigue, and when he was murdered Troy barely escaped with his own life. Aided only by telepathic animals from old Terra who had befriended him, he had no choice but to hide in ruins left behind by the now-vanished original inhabitants of Korwar; ruins which explorers had entered without returning....

Nik Kolherne had a face so cruelly scared and disfigured that he wore a mask to cover it. When he was recruited with a promise of being given a new face, a face which would make a young heir think he was someone else, he was uneasy, but accepted the offer. Then he found out that he was party to a kidnapping for more sinister purposes than he had been told, and he was the only hope of the young heir's survival--if the two of them could survive on a planet veiled in eternal night, swarming with dangerous predators....

The big cat cried "danger!" Troy Horan heard it with his mind just as he had heard the fox's warning and the kinkajou's. He didn't understand how he could communicate with the animals or why they were contacting him. But from the moment he began work at Kyger's pet emporium on Korwar he was enmeshed in a perilous intrigue... an intrigue that would leave more than one man dead, an entire government in jeopardy, and Horan himself both master and captive of the most extraordinary band of warriors his world had ever known.

The story concerns Nik Kolherne, who aids in a kidnapping to win a new face to replace his scarred one. He gets his new face and fights to free the kidnapped boy -- and himself -- from the Thieves Guild. - The action ends with a rousing battle on a planet of outlaws.... It is a rattling good adventure story which should be relished by science-fiction buffs of all ages.