xenology n.

‘Want to see him too?’ Schmidt shook his head. ‘For some reason I’ve never had much interest in the Dzlieri. If I ever get around to working on the xenology of Vishnu, then maybe I’ll take a squint.’

Dr. Wenceslaus Hornung, xenologist—even more untried in his job than I was in mine. For the Giants were the first Xenoids (aliens to you) that an earth man had ever found. For more than two centuries we’d been developing what some of them called Contact-Theory. It had never proved necessary in the solar system, but the theoretical work went on. Of all the boys who’d ever taken the works in BLAM (Biology, Linguistics, Anthropology, Mathematics) Laus was reckoned the absolute tops in xenology—so damned good that he could even get away with eccentricities like taking a pet on a space trip or scraping the hair off his face like an ancient Roman or a Dawn-Atomic man.

I meant to major in xenology and exotic biology in college.

You have every rotten plague and dangerous plant pest known to xenology, right here in your hand.

I hold a doctorate in Xenology. And I tell you, John, that what we’ve found in this ship, so far, doesn’t add up to any kind of sense at all.

Xenology students tried to communicate with them, as an exercise. No one had yet succeeded.

Included in the protectorate with the gentle Osmers and placid Glothees were the Ninfadelian Porsa, a race of raucous mucusoids so foul and unloveable that even graduate students in xenology, hardened by years of study among primitive and even disgusting societies, could seldom be found to live near the Porsa and study their ways.

Lark abruptly recalled something he had read once, in a rare galacto-xenology text, about a type of hydro-life called Zang.

I learned a bit of human speech and what passed for humor between us both. We told jokes. I learned something of human history and the history of other species in the galaxy and compared them to our own. That was my education in xenology.