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?"