A short, bald-headed earthling rushed toward me as soon as I entered the cave. “Gosh! You’re already here! Welcome to Gaudissimus, our robot construction company, boy!”

He grabbed my hand as if he wanted to squeeze the blood juice out of me, and started to pump my arm frantically. I made a series of smacking sounds preparing myself for a fight, in case he went too far, but Platon interrupted the earthling’s feverish reception.

“This is the head of our robotics company, Fedya,” Platon said to me and pointed to the short earthling. “I’m thrilled to introduce you to señor Martinez.”

Fyodor mumbled something in return that caused a new wave of effusive excitement from the big, sweaty chief. He tripped over himself with enthusiasm, and neither I, nor Fyodor, understood a word the chief said. It was Platon who explained to me later that señor Martinez spoke “Spanish”, some weird way of terrestrial speech coding, but at that time my host did not have the skill to decode it.

A decoded version of señor Martinez’s speech sounded like this: “Pleased to see the little genius, finally! Platon gave us incredible recommendations about you. How was the flight? Have you had lunch already? Wanna coffee? Tea?”

The chief continued bombarding us with questions encrypted in Spanish and I was not sure how to react.

“But, what the hell! There’s loads of work to be done… What are you looking at, boy?”

I was trying to check the place out with my left eye. According to the agency instructions for closed spaces, one had to locate possible escape routes first. The problem was that when my left eye moved, the right one followed helplessly in the same direction which made me lose sight of the unpredictable chief.

“What does the poor chap need two eyes for?” I wondered. “Dear Kintoop! He must have been born like this.”

“Our genius is a bit thick in the head today,” Platon said to señor Martinez and gave me a powerful pat on my back. “He had a late night yesterday and he’s still too preoccupied with the naked legs of the españolas.”

Señor Martinez forced himself to keep a straight face. Suddenly, like a chposh beaten by a composer club, he exploded into peals of loud cackling sounds, and so did Platon.

“What a naughty bastardo our Federico is,” said señor Martinez, without encoding his speech into Spanish. “When I was your age I was a successful womanizer too”.

He tried to pull up his spacesuit, that was actually impossible because of the size of his belly.

Fyodor examined him from head to foot and stretched my proboscis slightly. Meanwhile Marissa stepped forward and added, “So far Fyodor has been more interested in dogs, though.”

For a moment Platon tensed, like a jibajib that was hunting, and stared at Marissa.

“Perros? Dogs?? No way… What a dirty pig..!” señor Martinez howled with laughter again. “Well, as a fucking geniu…”

I twitched and a clear image of the mess of Smartoop’s body flashed into my mind. “Bugger me! How could I..?” If I had not been suddenly grabbed by Platon and Marisa, I definitely would have returned to save the lieutenant.

“The dude witnessed a car accident,” Platon explained. “He got lost in Gothic and saw a dog smashed to a pulp by a truck.”

“Boy, he’s a bit sensitive,” señor Martinez growled in Spanish encoding and thumped me on my shoulder. “What the hell, a pig with feelings… Soon you’ll earn tons of money for a new fluffy puppy, boy! Or better – much much better – you’ll invent an immortal ROBO-DOG for us. Let’s fucking robotize the country!”

Fyodor asked Platon what the hell our chief had just said. The brute grinned and decoded the chief’s speech into the normal terrestrial speech.

We saw a small grayish creature on the floor rapidly approaching señor Martinez.

“WORK!! TRA-BA-JAR-!! TRA-BA-JAR!!” it screamed bumping into Martinez’ leg. “AR-BEI-TEN!! AR-BEI-TEN!!”

Another dog, perhaps?