"I guess he did." Don sought a way to get the conversation away from Jen Jervis. "Where's Doc Bendy? He certainly turned out to be a disappointment."
"Poor Doc!" Alis said. "He's always the first to form a committee. But then his enthusiasm wears off and he goes back to the bottle. Only now he's got a keg."
Don snapped his fingers. "The keg. I almost forgot about that matter duplicator. If it can give you perfume and Doc rum.... Come on. Let's reopen negotiations with the Master."
They found the old man surrounded by a group of reporters, being charmingly evasive with the science editor of Time. Professor Garet had now joined this group, where he listened as eagerly as a student.
The Master was showing the vault-like chamber in which he had spent the generations since the spaceships left Gorel-zed. He let them examine the coffin-sized drawer that had been his bed and indicated the others where the younger ones still slept, awaiting the birth of their new planet. Don counted fewer than three dozen drawers.
"Is that all?" he asked.
"Infants and children take up less room," the Master said. "There are two or three in each drawer, and still others in the ships that never come to Earth. Even so, we number fewer than a thousand."
"But you have the matter duplicator," Don said. "Won't it work on people?"
"Unfortunately, no. Transubstantiation has never worked on living cells. Don't think we haven't tried. We shall have to encourage early marriages and hope for a high birth rate."
"Now about this transubstantiator," the Time man said, and Garet's head cocked in delight, apparently at the resounding sound of the word. "What's the principle? You don't have to give away the secret—just give me a general idea."