I recently started listening to the audio book of Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars, a book I last read when my mom encouraged me to check it out from our tiny village library when I was eight. At the time, I thought it was one of the greatest books I’d ever read, right up there with Danny Dunn and The Green Futures of Tycho. 
Listening to it has brought back a flood of nostalgia, and now I’m trying to remember the title of something else I read around the same time. Well, actually, two things.
One was a book I found near Time for the Stars, so presumably the author’s last name is something that starts with a letter near H[sup]1[/sup]. The book (or maybe it was just a short story in a book that was a collection of short stories) involved people who lived underwater in the ocean (or at least worked there) and were using artificial gills to breathe. Then there was trouble because somebody introduced a toxin into the water which was absorbed through somebody’s gills, and the other characters had to save the poisoned person.
I know that’s not much to go on, but does that sound familiar to anybody? It was probably written sometime in the 50’s or 60’s; this was a fairly old book.
The second book, which I read a few months later, was one I happened to find on a shelf in my grandma’s closet when I was staying at her house while on a vacation by myself (I don’t recall why I was on vacation by myself, but I think my grandma was taking me to Disney World or something, and I had gone to stay at her house for a week beforehand). The book was about a starship pilot who is basically a fighter pilot, because humanity is at war with some weird vaguely elephant-like creatures called the Laago or Luuga or something, and the human military finds a human ship that was (alert: spoiler if you haven’t read the book, though this is a pretty pointless warning, I suppose) attacked by the aliens and the pilot killed, but somehow the pilot’s mind has jumped into the ship and he now uses it for his body, and they seize upon this proof that humans can separate their minds from their bodies to make the main character jump into HIS ship so he can go on a secret mission to infiltrate alien space. I thought this book was way cool as well.
For some reason I think the author of the second book was Andre Norton, but that might have been the author of another book that I also found on my grandma’s shelf that had a weird picture on the cover. And my searches on Andre Norton’s books have revealed nothing that sounds even vaguely like this plot. If it wasn’t Andre Norton, I have the vague feeling that the author’s name may have started with a D.
So … anybody recognize either of these? As always, any help would be greatly appreciated.
[sup]1[/sup]Or maybe not. This was a very small library. But still.