The buzz created at the hospital was enormous. Needless to say, the biggest reaction was that it was some kind of practical joke. Finally, right in the middle of the break room at noon, Dr. Weinberg stood up and said "Colleagues, please look here." Around ten people were sitting at various tables.
"Is this about that joke memo?" asked one voice. "I thought we weren't supposed to do that."
"It's not a joke memo!" yelled Dr. Weinberg. "Look!" He draped a medallion around his neck and held up a plastic bag, in which was a scarf. Opening the bag, he let the medallion touch the scarf. The audience didn't see anything at first, but Fred's face was slowly starting to shift. He held up a hand, and the fingers were thinning, the nails getting longer.
The audience started to gasp as they realized the medallion was doing exactly what the memo said. At that point, they started bringing in people from the halls and from nearby offices. By the time Fred had become an exact copy of his wife, the audience had increased to twenty.
"Now," said Fred in a female voice, "I told you all about identities, but we don't always need to switch them. There's a Mr. Davis in room 1102 who lost his right arm in an accident. In a half hour from now, he's going to be completely well.
Fred reached into her jacket pocket to take out another plastic bag, this one containing a pair of gloves. She entered the room while taking out the gloves and touching them to the medallion. Putting the medallion around the neck of the surprised Mr. Davis, she waited. And out of the stump on the man's shoulder grew a piece of flesh which lengthened, showed the outlines of bones, and finally developed five protrusions on the end which rapidly grew into fingers. Mr. Davis, surprised, experimentally tried out his arm and hand. He lifted it up and down, then started grasping at the air. "It's real!" he said. "I don't know what you did...."
"It's something I can't easily explain," said Fred. "But I'll tell you, it's not medicine as we know it, but it's not a miracle either. It's just us poor humans learning new ways to use things that are already there...."
"Now," said Fred, "I'm going to send out another memo. Let me go to my desk."
Fred's memo was pretty short. He gave some more details about how he could use the medallion. Some patients only needed clothes from a store, like Mr. Adams. Some needed their own clothes; some patients who had been sick for a while needed not only old clothes, but years-old old clothes. Some could be cured by taking off the medallion after a partial change--you don't need a new identity if you're only changing your foot. And then there were the rest.
In the next five hours, Fred managed to cure ten patients and turn one sick baby into a crying, crawling, copy of his father (to be turned into a healthy baby the next day by using store-bought baby clothes).
The hospital started becoming very famous. But it was impossible to anticipate all the trouble that could happen. The first inkling of it came when....
