He opened the cabinet and showed them a comfortable leather seat inside.

“There are two compartments in this cabinet,” he said. “All this machine does is to produce, temporarily, an extra man to fill the sick man’s place. One of the men present steps in here; I close the door, see that the machine is charged here on the other side with plenty of linotype metal to provide the material of atomic synthesis, press the button, and lo!⁠—the man in the chair is duplicated on the other side of the cabinet.”

High-Pockets Jones stepped forward with his deep eyes fixed on Dr. Hudson. “What,” High-Pockets asked, “is your theory of this machine?”

Dr. Hudson smiled. “I am glad you asked that, Mr. Jones. Very glad. This process is in no sense a separation or thinning out of the man in the chair. It is, in reality; an unusual extension of the well-known fact that nature tends to follow a pattern. If you want to make a synthetic sapphire, you start with a seed sapphire, and the artificial process builds up on that. Now, this machine, which I call an extender, is merely a far-reaching extension of the synthesis of precious stones.”

“By use of a revolutionary type of three-dimensional scanner, which was invented by myself,” he said modestly, “I am able to focus on a certain object from a certain distance and, if there is material at hand, synthesize an exact duplicate of the original from the scanner. It doesn’t hurt the original in any way. You merely have two where you had but one.”

The men stood around bug-eyed and stared incredulously⁠—all but High-Pockets. “Is the second one alive?” he asked. “I mean, would you say it has a soul?”

“That,” said Dr. Hudson crisply, “is out of my field. I suggest you consult your spiritual adviser.”

The chairman stepped up, “You have tried this thing, have you?”