Science fiction novel with elements of fantasy. A first contact story. Verrons, the interstellar explorer, is infected with the dread bloodblossom disease & exiled to a quarantine planet. But Verrons isn't the kind of man to stay quietly in a depressing little colony of dying humanoids. Together with Wells, a human from the ice-planet Talberon, & Tiehl, a bird-man alien, he strikes out across the surveyed-but-unexplored wilderness of the planet.