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."
She extended her hands and he took off the fine wrinkles with a sweeping motion of the spray. "What happened?"
"I had to start looking for another job. But somebody higher up began to think about what I'd done. Now, on Earth, all robots that model clothing have 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 ought to be a place for a good designer, even if I did have to work on robots." 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 bodies for 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 any time. When they got a robot, they wanted perfection."