ASSIGNMENT:
HELL WORLD!
They took the body of Park Lacoch and stripped away his mind, transplanting the mind of a top Confederacy operator to his brain. Then they stuck him aboard a spaceship and exiled him to Charon, on of the Worlds of the Warden Diamond, from which no man could ever return. A mysterious organism on those world infected everything, making life away from them impossible afterward.
Charon was a well-world in literal fact. It was too near the sun, making life all but unbearable in its hot, steamy atmosphere. Strange beasts roamed the jungles - and stranger still, the group known as the Witchcraft plotted with the Lord in exile to take over the planet.
There Witchcraft was real - for on Charon, magic worked! The Warden organism could be made to perform almost any feat under the control of a skilled witch or sorcerer - as Park Lacoch discovered when he was transformed into a changeling - a half-beast half -man, with the beast rapidly gaining ascendancy.
After that, his assignment really became difficult...
FIRST TIME IN PRINT