There were five patent attorneys in the room, waiting their turn to be
heard by the Board of Appeals. Krome was in the middle of the room up
to his waist in the floor. His arms flailed wildly as he tried to keep
his balance.
The panic-stricken attorneys stood on tables and chairs hurling
whatever they could lay their hands on at the monster that confronted
them. Books, inkwells, and brief cases rained around Krome’s helmeted
figure. Finally one of the attorneys reached down and hoisted a chair
high over his head.
Krome saw it and raised an arm in terrified protest. For the first time
his voice came out through the speaker attached to the diving suit.
“No! No!” he screamed. But it did no good. With fear-driven muscles the
attorney launched the chair at Krome. It struck him sharply across the
chest.
The two shattered ends of the chair hurtled past him, and crashed
against the opposite wall. The middle portion that had hit his body
flattened out like water against the suit. Part of it flowed down, and
formed wooden puddles on the floor. Other parts splashed out sideways
in little streamlets that solidified into splinters and sprinkled all
over the floor.
The attorneys stared bug-eyed at what had happened to the chair. For a
brief instant they were paralyzed. Then, moving as a single man, all
five of them made a dive for the doorway. I was directly in their path,
and I never had a chance.
I was a wreck when the stampede had passed over me. My nose was
bleeding profusely, my left trouser-leg was ripped off at the knee, and
my right sleeve was gone. There were even footprints on my naked chest.
I crawled back to the door and looked in. Krome was gone. I got to my
feet and slowly started to walk toward the stairs. I tried in vain to
stem the flow of blood with my shirttail. One eye was swelling fast,
and a front tooth had worked loose.
I wandered out into the next lower corridor in search of Krome. I
looked in at the doorway of what seemed to be the proper room. It was.
The Primary Examiner was sitting at his desk talking to an ashen-faced
young fellow. Neither of them was saying anything. Their eyes were
fixed on a stationary point at one corner of the Primary’s desk. At
first I couldn’t tell what it was. Then I caught a movement, and my
heart sank.
Krome had descended on the Primary’s desk. Apparently he had thrashed
around while trying to get his balance, and now he was half-stuck in
the desk. I got there just in time to see the helmet, right side up at
last, take up a fixed position at one end of a shelf of books.
“Oh,” said the Primary peering in through the faceplate. “I’m glad
you dropped in, Krome. I’d like you to meet Jones, our newest junior
Examiner. He just joined us today. Mr. Jones, Mr. Krome.” There was a
bitter, almost savage irony in his voice.
Krome nodded curtly, only his head visible above the desk top. His
arm came out of the desk as he started to shake hands. But he thought
better of it and his arm dropped out of sight again. Jones just sat
there, white, tense.
The Primary nodded. “Some misguided applicant has just cut his own
throat by persuading Mr. Krome to try out his invention.” He turned to
Jones. “There’s a good lesson here. The inventor has merely substituted
stone for water. In processes it’s a common expedient to substitute
one ordinary medium for another. Diving suits are no exception. Mere
gadgeteering.”
Jones just sat there staring at Krome’s head. I don’t think he heard
anything the Primary said. I could see that if anybody was going to
defend my application, I’d have to do it myself. I walked into the room
and took up the battle.
“But how,” I demanded, “can you reject an inventor on his own
co-pending application-one that hasn’t even been issued as a patent?”
Krome gave me a pained look through the quartz porthole. “Section one
hundred and two, A, says the invention must not have been known before
the invention by the applicant. There’s no inventive advance in the
diving suit over Marchare’s prior cabbagite application. Hence, in
effect, the diving suit invention was known when Marchare invented
cabbagite.”
I blinked at his steady black eyes. “You mean,” I said, “like jet
planes were known when the Chinese invented the sky rocket?”
“Precisely. This concept of patent law is so sound, so logical, that
I can’t understand why the Supreme Court took nearly a hundred and
fifty years to swing around to it. And, of course, when it’s the
inventor’s own prior work that’s used to reject a current application,
the situation is a double strike against him.” He leered at me
triumphantly. “How can a man be smarter than himself?”
“But even the Supreme Court says you can’t reject an application on
a combination merely because you can find all its elements in the
prior art,” I protested. “There can still be a patentable invention
in combining those elements. Here the invention consists of combining
cabbagite _and_ a diving suit. Nobody ever thought of that before.”
“Of course they never thought of it before,” he explained patiently.
“They couldn’t, because they never heard of cabbagite before.”
“Then nobody but Marchare could invent the diving suit.”
“Quite true. But the minute he invented it, it became non-invention,
because, since it was _he_ who invented it, it didn’t require
invention.”
The new Examiner finally recovered his faculties, He slapped both hands
on his knees, got up, and said, “Well, so long, sir. By resigning right
now I may have a fighting chance of retaining my sanity.” And he walked
out the side door shaking his head.
“What’s the matter with him?” asked the Primary in a puzzled voice.
Krome said, “I don’t know. Perhaps he--” He stopped. The helmet had
suddenly dropped a couple of inches further into the desk. It hung
there a split second, then dropped a few inches more. Step by step he
was slipping down. We heard his muffled voice coming out of the desk
through the cracks around the drawers, but we couldn’t understand what
he said. The Primary and I leaned over to look under the desk. We
watched the floor close over the helmet.
The Primary straightened up, and glared at me. “Well,” he said. “If
you’ll excuse me, I have lots of work to do.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “I have to go find Mr. Krome anyway. Goodbye, and
thanks for your trouble.”
“No trouble, no trouble,” he retorted with a venomous inflection,
picking up a document from his desk top and beginning to read it.