Tau Cetan adj.

They paled, they trembled, but they stayed. Well, I would have paled and trembled myself if it had been a Tau Cetan trait. Instead, I merely went limp. Terror was not only on one side in that room, I confess it.

The colors we see in our sky—or might see in Tau Ceti I’s sky, were we to go there—stem from a number of different physical effects taking place within the gases of the air. And the color we see depends on our eyes; Tau Cetan eyes might not be adapted for viewing terrestrial skies or human eyes for viewing theirs. The human eye is, after all, a very specialized organ.

His good sense barely restrained him from making her an awkward present of a large ruffed Tau Cetan beaded lizard, bright as jewelry, that caught her eye. It had rather strict dietary requirements, and besides, Miles was not quite sure if the 50 kilo beast could be housebroken.

Exobiology had been a science in search of a subject for nearly three centuries. Generations of practitioners had written millions of scientific papers on what alien life-forms ought to be like, all without having even a single nonterrestrial specimen to study. Yet, dangling from that blue-white light in the sky was a ship, and in that ship were living, breathing, thinking beings from another star. At the least, they would bring with them the Tau Cetian equivalent of body lice, intestinal bacteria, perhaps even shipboard cockroaches. To Kit Claridge, that was a veritable alien ecology!

Dr. Jones, can you imagine the typical customer’s reaction to being attacked by a Tau Cetian monster?