The Callean

I have remarked, e.g., here, on the ability of Poul Anderson's characters to deal in a matter-of-fact way with non-humanoid aliens of any size or shape. No doubt they would be equally well equipped to cope with James Blish's Callean in "This Earth of Hours":

too big to enter a spaceship compartment so that the Terrestrial representative must go out to meet him;

apparently, a mixture of several different phyla;

a 25-foot long segmented tube, as wide as a barrel;

no head, just a front end raised ten feet above the ground;

two large faceted eyes and three simple eyes, the latter usually closed;

six squid-like tentacles;

able to move quickly in a straight line across the planet;

telepathically linked so that the entire planetary population has a single identity ("I" means not "this organism" but all of them and one can be killed without retaliation);

forms unaccustomed human speech by emitting from many spiracles single tones that inter-modulate as words with intonations.

(Similarly, in The Seedling Stars, the telepathic microscopic aquatic organisms address men by vibrating their cilia to produce inter-modulating sound waves.)