out again, nude. "Where do you want me to stand?"
"On the pedestal, under the light." He looked at her closely. He hadthought she was a little girl, a tired little girl who hadn't slept muchrecently. It was the pert face that had fooled him, with the upturnednose, because she wasn't young. Forty he would say, maybe more, nearlyas old as Burlingame.
Her body was slight, but not much was wrong with it. Here and there werea few wrinkles, though in general her figure appeared youthful. It wouldrequire all his skill to make her as spectacular in a low-cut gown asshe wanted to be. And her legs, though well shaped, were slightlybowed, a sure sign of Venusian rickets. Early settlers hadn't realizedthat the soil was deficient in some essential trace elements.
He would have to straighten her legs if she expected to mingle withsociety. It was beyond his power to change the bones, but he could addpseudo-flesh to give the same effect.
He slipped on the mask, attached the various containers, thrust his handinto the glovelike control valve, and began to work.
She winced involuntarily as the spray tingled against her body andadhered with constrictive force. He blocked out the areas he had toalter and then began to fill in and build up.
"I don't see it," said Emily. "I know you must be good. That's whyBurlingame 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 withpart of his mind, essentially he was wrong. As the spray was drying onher legs, he started filling out her breasts. "However, this isn't asmuch out of my line as you think. Engineers specialize, you know. Mine'sindustrial design. We don't usually monkey with the internal mechanismof a machine, though we're able to. Mostly, we design housings for themachines, robots as a rule."
He proceeded to her face and changed the upturned nose to a straightone. "The ideal external appearance of a machine ought to establish thefunction of that machine, and do so with the most efficient distributionof space and material."
He stood back and eyed the total effect. She was coming along. "Thehuman 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 wheelsor treads, with eye-stalks and tentacles on top. I designed one likethat, but it was never built. Robots always look like beautiful girls orhandsome men, and the mechanism is twice as clumsy as it should be, inorder to fit in with that conception."
He squinted at the spray. "In other words, I design robot bodies andfaces. Why should it be strange I can do the same with humans?"
The spray was neither a liquid nor a dustlike jet. She shivered underit. "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 meaninglessperfection of the bodies I was turning out. Why shouldn't the bodies bebeautiful, considering how they're made? Anyway, I put a pimple on onemodel. Not on her face. Her shoulder."
She extended her hands and he took off the fine wrinkles with a sweepingmotion of the spray. "What happened?"
"I had to start looking for another job. But somebody higher up began tothink about what I'd done. Now, on Earth, all robots that model clothinghave some perceptible skin defects. More lifelike, they say."
"Is that why you came to Venus?"
"I'd been considering it for some time. It seemed to me that there oughtto be a place for a good designer, even if I did have to work onrobots." He smiled wryly. "A lot of other engineers had the same idea."
"Too much competition?"
"Sort of." He grimaced. "My first job here was designing female bodiesfor so-called social clubs."
"Oh, those," she said scornfully.
"It's legitimate on Venus. Anyway, I tried out that idea again.Customers didn't like it. Said they could get women with blemishes anytime. When they got a robot, they wanted perfection."
"Don't blame them," Emily said practically. She looked at him withsudden suspicion. "Don't give _me_ pimples."
"Not a one," he assured her. "You're flawless."
And she was--with only one item missing. He flexed his fingers in thecontrol glove and sprayed on nipples. She was finished.
He shucked off the mask and laid aside the spray gun. "Look atyourself."
She went to the mirror and turned in front of it. She smoothed her handsacross her face and smiled with pleasure. "It feels like flesh."
"It is, almost. Tomorrow you'll bleed there if you cut yourself."
She nodded. "Is that all?"
"Except for instructions, yes."
She looked at him with curious shyness and hurriedly slipped into herclothing. She hadn't minded nudity before, when she wasn't as lovely asshe wanted to be. What she didn't know was that Jadiver liked her betteras she had been.
* * * * *
Dressed, she came back to him. "What are those instructions?"
He tore off two envelopes attached to the container. He checked thespray gun to determine how much had been used.
"Pseudo-flesh is highly poisonous," he said, handing her the envelopes."The tablets in the white package neutralize the toxic effects. Take oneevery eight hours. And don't forget to take it, unless you want to endup in convulsions on the floor."
"I'll remember. When do I begin?"
"In three hours. And now for some advice I know you don't want. You cankeep yourself as you are for two months. But you'll be healthier if youget rid of the pseudo-flesh as soon as you can."
She looked longingly at the face in the mirror. "How do I do that?"
"When you're ready, take the tablets in the green package, one everyhour until the pseudo-flesh is absorbed. After it's gone, take threemore at the same interval. The total time should be about thirteenhours." She was not paying attention. He eased between her and themirror. "Get a complete checkup before you try this again. It takesyears off your life."
"I know that. How many?"
"I can't say exactly. It's a body, pseudo-flesh weight ratio, plus someother factors that no one knows anything about. I'd estimate that you'lllose about three years for every two weeks you keep it."
"It's worth it," she said, gazing again into the mirror. She turned awayin indecision. "I've always known Burlingame was mine, even if I wasn'tpretty. Now I'm not so sure, after this."
It wasn't exactly Burlingame she was concerned with, thought Jadiver.For a while she was going to be beautiful beyond her expectations. Theirony was that almost any robot outshone her temporary beauty. She wasjealous of machines that had no awareness of how they looked.
Jadiver straightened up. He hadn't fully recovered from his accident andhe was tired. And the artificial skin, no matter what they said, hadn'tbeen completely integrated to his body. It itched.
"Send the rest of them in, one at a time," he said as she went out.
It wasn't going to take long, for which he was grateful. Now that heknew a spying device hadn't been surgeried into him, there were certainaspects of the accident that demanded investigation.
* * * * *
Jadiver limped into the apartment. The chair unfolded and came to meethim as he entered. He relaxed in the depths of it and called out forfood. Soon he had eaten, and shortly after that he dozed.
When he awakened, refreshed, he began the thinking he'd put off untilnow. The fee from Burlingame was welcome. It was dangerous business, soJadiver had charged accordingly. Now his economic problem was solved forabout a month.
In the hospital he had been sure of a motive for the accident. It hadseemed simple enough: the police had planted a spying device in him.However, since he had been examined thoroughly at Burlingame's andnothing had been found, that theory broke down.
&
nbsp; There was still another possibility--someone had tried to kill him andhad failed. If so, that put the police in the clear and he would have tolook elsewhere. He might as well start there.
He walked over to the autobath and began inspecting it. It wasn't theone he'd been injured in. That had been removed and replaced by themanagement. It would have helped if he had been able to go over theoriginal one.
The new autobath was much like the old, a small unit that fitteddecoratively into the scheme of the room, not much taller than anupright man, or