Alien Zoo Ship II

Occasionally, I comment on the fearsome appearance of some of Poul Anderson's aliens, even though his characters, like Nicholas van Rijn and David Falkayn, regularly do business with such exotic intelligences as readily as they would with fellow human beings.

Here is one of the species in the captured zoo ship:

restless black creatures in dim red light;
stumpy-legged;
quadrupedal;
faceless heads armored in bony material (!);
two sets of three thick, rope-like arms;
two of the arms ending in three boneless fingers/tentacles;
breathing hydrogen under high pressure in triple gravity at seventy below.

These "octopus horses" or "tentacle centaurs" turn out not to be intelligent but suppose they had done? Would you, wearing an armored, heated spacesuit, of course, walk up to such a creature, shake his hand and offer him a business deal? Well, you would not necessarily shake his hand. First, you would have to research which kind of gesture would be expected or appropriate and indeed safe...

The captain asks:

"'Are they the only ones who like that kind of weather?'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2011), p. 579 -

- to which the chief engineer, giving him "...a sharp look...," responds:

"'I see what you are getting at, skipper.'" (ibid.)

I do not see what he is getting at. Anderson's texts do not have many such moments when we have to guess or deduce what his characters are driving at. The chief engineer has found three other cubicles with the same kind of environment but their occupants are obvious animals like snakes. Van Rijn's current female companion suggests that the crew would not take animals from home with them but van Rijn replies that his yacht has a cat and parrots, also that many planets have similar conditions.

The plot thickens.