Tindar stood before the reception desk of the Central Commercial Duplication Laboratories of North America with his governmental certificates of permission for his "duping." The white-uniformed woman receptionist studied his certificates, handed him an identification disc, and waved him on. She pressed a button on the desk and the information about him was wired to the other stations.

An attendant met and ushered him down a long, cool, white corridor to the section of the building devoted to the duplication of living matter. Another attendant took him from the first and whisked him up in an elevator to the floor where, as the somber sign stated, "Duplication of the Human Being" was carried on. He was directed to a pneumatic chair in the waiting room and he sat down.

Tindar had never ceased to wonder at the startling work done in this massive building, which most people, over the course of the last hundred years of its use, had come to consider a natural part of the bustling, scientific worlds. C.D. Labs, holding a benevolent monopoly on the process, could duplicate anything composed of atoms and smaller than a three-storied dwelling in a matter of minutes. The products of such duplication existed only for a period of about eighty hours, but it had proved to be a tremendously utilitarian device in duplicating oil and coal for immediate use; in duplicating the bodies of persons undergoing operations for dissection before the operation; for creating microbes of diseases and studying their effects upon the body, after which they would conveniently disappear, and for duplicating persons whose talents or brawn were needed briefly for special problems. This last use had been a great aid to industries by providing living, breathing, duplicates of specially trained men in times of need; which times were frequent since the peoples of earth were spread so thinly over seven planets and thousands of asteroids.

A nurse came into the waiting room with a glass of brown fluid on a tray. Tindar, no novice at duplication, smiled at the nurse in recognition, took the glass and drank it down. It was a sedative that would put him deeply to sleep in a few minutes, so that he could be pleasantly oblivious to the slight discomfort of the duplication cell.

He followed the nurse into the "Dupe" room and ran a familiar eye over the shining and ponderous equipment. He knew the theory vaguely. Space, warped, formed positive and negative fields. These fields, subjected to warping and energy changes, formed nascent matter, unstable and simple. Warped again, the inchoate matter formed 

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