Her body was slight, but not much was wrong with it. Here and there were
a few wrinkles, though in general her figure appeared youthful. It would
require all his skill to make her as spectacular in a low-cut gown as
she wanted to be. And her legs, though well shaped, were slightly
bowed, a sure sign of Venusian rickets. Early settlers hadn't realized
that the soil was deficient in some essential trace elements.
He would have to straighten her legs if she expected to mingle with
society. It was beyond his power to change the bones, but he could add
pseudo-flesh to give the same effect.
He slipped on the mask, attached the various containers, thrust his hand
into the glovelike control valve, and began to work.
She winced involuntarily as the spray tingled against her body and
adhered with constrictive force. He blocked out the areas he had to
alter and then began to fill in and build up.
"I don't see it," said Emily. "I know you must be good. That's why
Burlingame wanted you. But it seems to me this is out of your line."
He brought the spray up in a straight line along the edge of her shin.
"How good I am is a matter of opinion. Mine and the places I've worked."
"What places, for instance?"
"Mostly Earth."
"I've never been there," she said wistfully.
"You haven't missed much." He knew that, while he believed that with
part of his mind, essentially he was wrong. As the spray was drying on
her legs, he started filling out her breasts. "However, this isn't as
much out of my line as you think. Engineers specialize, you know. Mine's
industrial design. We don't usually monkey with the internal mechanism
of a machine, though we're able to. Mostly, we design housings for the
machines, robots as a rule."
He proceeded to her face and changed the upturned nose to a straight
one. "The ideal external appearance of a machine ought to establish the
function of that machine, and do so with the most efficient distribution
of space and material."
He stood back and eyed the total effect. She was coming along. "The
human body is a good design--for a human. It doesn't belong on a robot.
That, for most purposes, should be a squat container with three wheels
or treads, with eye-stalks and tentacles on top. I designed one like
that, but it was never built. Robots always look like beautiful girls or
handsome men, and the mechanism is twice as clumsy as it should be, in
order to fit in with that conception."
He squinted at the spray. "In other words, I design robot bodies and
faces. Why should it be strange I can do the same with humans?"
The spray was neither a liquid nor a dustlike jet. She shivered under
it. "Why don't you like robots? I don't see anything wrong with them.
They're so beautiful."
He laughed. "I'll give you an idea. I got tired of the meaningless
perfection of the bodies I was turning out. Why shouldn't the bodies be
beautiful, considering how they're made? Anyway, I put a pimple on one
model. Not on her face. Her shoulder."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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