Look Out For Space (Seven For Space) by William F Nolan Page A

way.
    When I arrived at the Outer Guestdoor the party was roaring: I could hear wild laughter and a variety of lust shrieks from inside. One of Wrenhurst's faceless robos took my invite card at the door and pressed it into his stomach. A little green light went on inside his skullcase and he bowed to me.
    "This way, sir." And he rolled ahead of me down a hallway wide enough to park swamp cabs three abreast. At the end of the hall he gave my card to a second robo, bowed again, and rolled off.
    The new robo didn't press the card into his stomach; he sat on it. "You are Tyrus … You are Tyrus … You are Tyrus …" Smoke began coming out of his ears.
    Then he stood up again, grabbed my hat and began eating it.
    I snatched it back. "Hey, you metal mucker, gratch feathers don't come cheap!"
    He looked at me with his blank face. "Ty is you is … Yipe is Tyrus … Tip is yipus …"
    Which is when Wrenhurst appeared at the hall door with a big smile. "Steadman! Good to see you made it."
    "Your robo's wonked out," I said. "He tried to eat my hat."
    Wrenhurst pressed a wallstud. Three Moonies popped in to carry away the smoking robo.
    Wrenhurst sighed. "Hard to get good help these days. My robos keep breaking down. Moondust gets into their solenoids. Next thing you know they're out of sync. Last week the robo gardener, a very loyal machine I've had in the family for years, tried to plant Charlie, my favorite electronic wolfhound. Thought Charlie was a cactus. I had him disconnected."
    "The wolfhound?"
    "No, the gardener. Charlie's fine. He's in the kitchen right now, chewing on an electric bone."Wrenhurst chuckled. "He's all solid state. Not a tube in him."
    "I can see you're devoted to Charlie."
    "A man and his dog," said Wrenhurst, shaking his vulpine head. "Potent combination. As old as recorded civilization. There's a primitive emotional bond between a man and his dog that no scientist will ever be able to explain."
    "Yeah," I said. " A man and his rabbit just isn't the same thing."
    "Not at all," agreed Wrenhurst somberly, "not at all."
    Small talk is always the first step in winning confidence. And, with the king, I was doing aces.
    He led me to the party.
    It was wild. A gastropod from the Lower Pleiades was chasing a giggling skinhead behind the bar, and three gasbags from Neptune were drunkenly deflating on the center dance floor.
    In the nearest cubbycorner a pair of lust-crazed young Martians were probe-rubbing each other into a norxca state. Last time I'd seen anything like that in public was aboard the President Agnew on the Mars-Earth run.
    But I was no prude. In my game, shock is a luxury you can't afford.
    A multi-nosed Dogstar female with puce scuppers approached me, eyes aglint. "Hidey hi, hi!" she said, bumping a scupper against my leg."My name's Looly, and I adore fast male Earthlings. I almost orged when I saw you win that race. You were absolutely winkers out there at speed!"
    "My boat blew up," I said. "So I didn't really win. Mr. Wrenhurst must be considered the official victor."
    "Wrenhurst can go frab!" she said darkly.
    "I thought you adored fast male Earthlings."
    She rubbed the other scupper suggestively against me. "Only when they're nice, like you," she husked. "And Pendorf isn't nice at all! We've sexed together and I can tell you, he's perverted. "
    "How so?" Maybe, in her drunken state of abandon, she might provide some tad of inside info I could use against the king.
    "He asked me to perform an unnatural act with his electronic wolf-hound."
    "Charlie?"
    She grimaced, and two of her noses twitched. "Yes, that's the name of the shaggy beast."
    "What did he want you to do?"
    "Get down on the floor and chew electric bones with the hound," she said. "Ugh! Isn't that revolting?"
    "And probably dangerous," I said. "Bet you could sustain quite a nasty shock from an electric bone if you bit deep enough."
    "Wrenhurst is also a sadist," she declared. "He's got this little box of electronic fleas he bought on