The aliens are symbionts and must inhabit other bodies to survive. The premise is that a good guy alien, Hunter, is pursuing across space a bad guy alien, Killer, and they both emerge from FTL in their separate ships near Earth and crash into the ocean just offshore of an island near Tahiti. Needle (Equinox/Avon SF Rediscovery #20, 1976, cover by Mike Presley) Gist (The edition I’m reading, and using pagination from, is a 1974 trade paperback reprint in Avon/Equinox’s SF Rediscovery series, with an odd cover illustration depicting two Greek-like gods fighting in the clouds. And published, incidentally, as a juvenile, in the “Doubleday Young Moderns” series, despite, as SFE notes, certain themes. This is Needle, serialized in Astounding and expanded to book form the following year for Doubleday. (Others in this vein were Iceworld, 1953, and Cycle of Fire, 1957.)

He’s most famous for the 1954 novel Mission of Gravity and his reputation rests on its sort of hard science fiction: alien environments rigorously extrapolated from known physical principles. His first story was “Proof” in the June 1942 issue and his next 10 stories appeared in the magazine throughout the ‘40s. Campbell in the pages of Astounding magazine in the 1940s. Hal Clement (legal name Harry Stubbs) was one of the stable of science fiction writers developed by John W. ( Astounding Science Fiction, May-June 1949 expanded to book form: Doubleday, 222 pages, $2.50 in hardcover, 1950)

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Needle by Hal Clement