Part 2

With nerveless fingers I obeyed. I can remember wondering whether there was anything in his life insurance policy that would have covered a possibly fatal outcome. I hoped they wouldn’t make his widow and children wait seven years.

I turned to glance at the door to see if there were any witnesses. No one was watching. I turned back to Krome and noticed with alarm that he appeared to have grown shorter. For a moment I thought he had fallen to his knees. But then I saw that he was slowly sinking through the floor.

I made gestures with my hands in front of his face plate in a frantic attempt to show him how to operate the controls. Lower and lower he sank. I followed him right down to the floor until he disappeared through it, leaving me on my hands and knees staring at the blank and dusty tiles.

Then I realized with horror that we were on the seventh floor.

I turned and rushed out of the room and down the hall to the stairway. I tore down the stairs, and out into the hall below. I ran for the room directly underneath the one where Krome had been. Before I could reach it several sickeningly-curdled screams resounded through the corridor, and I heard the muffled bangs of things crashing to the floor. A few loose papers floated out through the open door.

I pulled up in the doorway, and looked in.

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.

I trotted on down to the room underneath.

The door was closed, and on it in big letters were the words NARCOTICS BUREAU. I carefully opened the door and looked inside.

* * * * *

It was a small room, and there were only four men in it. Three of them were bent intently over their desks. But the fourth man had tilted back in his chair for a moment’s reflection and contemplation. His hands were clasped behind his head, and everything about him was normal--except his eyes. No human eyes should ever protrude the way his did.

Krome hung suspended from the ceiling. Everything below his collar bone was in plain sight, and most of it was thrashing around noiselessly. For about ten seconds it continued thus--the immobile narcotics expert, the quivering Krome. Then Krome managed to turn on the energy field in the upper part of the suit. Without a sound he slipped out of the ceiling, fell through the floor, and disappeared.

Nobody saw him go except me and the thinker. That amazing gentleman swallowed hard and sat upright. A quick glance convinced him that none of the others had noticed anything wrong. He swallowed again, sighed heavily, and then methodically began to clean out his desk.

As I was sadly closing the door, I realized with sudden consternation that Krome was dropping toward the Search Room on the ground floor. And the ceiling there was over twenty feet high. I began to run again.

The Search Room was quiet when I burst into it, holding my tattered and blood-caked clothing tightly around me. The occupants of the room gave me strange looks, but they were so used to having screwballs around that nobody said anything. I kept my eyes on the ceiling.

For a moment there was no sign of Krome. Then off to one side, over near the entrance where the patent bundles were kept, a foot appeared from the ceiling. It moved around as if seeking a firm place to stand, and then quickly withdrew back into the ceiling. It cautiously reappeared a moment later, closer to the huge pillars that stretched down to the floor. Again it sought a footing.

I heaved a sigh of relief. Krome evidently knew where he was, and was taking no chances. As I stared the foot vanished for the second time.

It came into view again an instant later, this time about eighteen inches from the arch at the summit of the pillars. It flitted around and found the pillar. Hands flashed through the ceiling as Krome paddled himself over, and then carefully lowered himself out of the ceiling and into the arch at the top. Large portions of him were now in plain view.

The uproar from the floors above had been steadily increasing in volume. The people in the Search Room were glancing questioningly at one another. And just as Krome was about to complete his transfer to the pillar one of the patent stenographers saw him.

Her screams all but shattered every window in the block-long room. Everybody froze. All eyes followed the stenographer’s hand that was pointing to where Krome was just beginning to descend, half in and half out of the pillar. A long moment of stark silence gave a kind of funeral dirge significance to what followed.

There were only two exits. I was smart this time. I stood off to one side as the terrified occupants of the room leaped over the search tables like gazelles fleeing from a lion. Chairs were crushed to pulpwood. Many people had been back in the stacks when the commotion started, and were now emerging with their arms loaded with bundles of patents. Instantly the air was thick with flying documents.

I couldn’t help but admire the consummate skill with which Krome descended the column. His rear end protruded as he stepped slowly down. Every four or five feet, he’d stop, turn around, and thrust his head out to make sure where he was. Then he’d disappear for a moment, out would come his backside again, and the slow descent would resume.

There was a revolving fan fastened to the pillar about seven feet above the floor. I watched, fascinated, as Krome got closer and closer to it. Finally fan and fanny met. The blades flowed into long slivers of metal that shot across the room and _spanged_ off the walls. The motor, relieved of its load, began to race faster and faster.

Krome must have felt the gentle blows of the blades because his hand reached out of the pillar and brushed at them as though he were shooing a fly. His hand passed through the fan support. There was a shower of sparks and a little smoke curled up. The fan sagged forward on its support and then solidified as Krome’s hand moved on through. I never saw a sorrier looking device than that fan once Krome got through with it. The electricians would be in for a bad few hours trying to figure out what had happened to it.

Krome finally reached the floor, stepped out of the pillar, turned off the suit, and heaved a big sigh. He turned around and for the first time got a good look at the Search Room. Most of the chairs were reduced to rubble. Many of the large search tables were overturned and broken and Krome himself stood knee-deep in patents.

Krome gave one puzzled and uncomprehending glance at all this. Then he looked at the clock over the door. “Good grief!” he groaned. “Two thirty-five! The Commissioner!” He turned and ran through one of the archways that opened into the stacks. I lit out after him.

He had turned the suit on again, except for the soles of the feet. This gave him a decided advantage over me. He could take short cuts through solid walls. He went through the back wall of the stacks without even slowing down.

I cut off to one side through the door that led into the foreign art. I stopped and listened. From the other end of the long law room I heard a sudden splintering crash. I raced on in trepidation. A man was standing near the Swedish art. A broken pint bottle lay at his feet and whiskey was lapping at the soles of his shoes. His forefinger was half-crooked in front of his face. But it was his bulging eyes, aimed at a section of the wall, which pointed out the direction Krome had taken. As I turned from him he collapsed, head in hands, and began to sob quietly.

I quickly found my way to the back corridor. As I proceeded down it, the now-familiar ruckus started up in the Mail Room. Women screamed, men shouted, and heavy objects thumped on the floor. Krome had used very poor judgment in cutting through the Mail Room. But how was he to know that the people in it were not scientifically-minded?

I waited until one of the doors stopped spewing people, and then leaped resolutely inside. One glance convinced me that the Patent Office would not be running smoothly for a considerable period to come. Several of the clerks had dropped to their knees and were praying, some quietly, some loudly.

There were papers everywhere. And an empty mailbag dangled limply from an overhead light, looking startlingly like the victim of an over-wrought hangman. One man sat on the floor in front of a pile of thousands of newly-arrived applications. He was laughing insanely and tossing repeated handfuls of applications high overhead. Petitions, checks, notarized oaths, drawings, and fragments of applications slithered through the air like snowflakes in a blizzard. Krome had passed through, all right.

I walked amidst the bedlam unnoticed seeking some sign of Krome. I couldn’t figure out where he had gone. Then suddenly I had it--his two-thirty appointment with the Commissioner.

I jumped to a window and looked out. My heart almost stopped beating at what I saw.

A girl was walking away from me along the sidewalk, her hips swinging up and down like the ends of a seesaw. Krome was plowing along right behind her, completely out of control, getting closer all the time. He was tilted forward pawing at the ground with his hands, now submerged to his neck, now above ground to his ankles. The girl had ignored his first frantic warnings, so Krome shouted again. She threw an annoyed glance back over one shoulder and--the seesaw froze.

Krome churned closer and closer. My heart was in my mouth. I had no idea what would happen when the diving suit bumped into a live human being. I stopped breathing.

Closer and closer! Then just as a collision seemed inevitable Krome executed a rather neat surface dive into the pavement which carried him safely and spectacularly underneath her feet. Almost instantly he reappeared on the other side doing a strong overhand stroke which quickly put a safe distance between himself and the grievously threatened young lady. She toppled over in a dead faint.

I dashed into the next building, into an office where a short, heavyset man stood bending over a huge desk. I recognized him in a flash. The Commissioner of Patents!

At the Commissioner’s desk side sat a man in uniform--a two-star general.

It added up. I thought fast. Krome--the Commissioner--the general.

I cleared my throat as they looked up blankly. “I beg your pardon,” I said politely. “I’m Mr. Saddle, Dr. Marchare’s attorney in the diving suit case. Mr. Krome suggested I be here during his appointment on this matter.”

“Really?” grunted the Commissioner. “And where is Mr. Krome?”

“He said he’d be passing through any moment now,” I said hurriedly. Just then Krome walked in through the north wall. Fortunately neither the general nor the Commissioner saw him until he stepped out from the wall.

The Commissioner glared at Krome, then at his desk clock. “You’re late,” he chided. “However, since you brought the suit, that’ll save time. Gentlemen, this is General Bond, Secret Weapons Bureau, Department of Defense.”

Krome got it immediately too. But, like other people who live by their wits, my reflexes were faster. I said smoothly, “Mr. Krome and I have just been giving the suit a tryout, and he invited me along to the conference.” I beamed sideways at Krome. “He finds all the claims allowable, and my client stands prepared to license the Secretary of Defense to manufacture, at a very reasonable royalty, any and all--”

“But--” sputtered Krome.

“Mr. Krome has applied to most stringent tests.” I continued hurriedly as I sidled over toward the encased, protesting figure. And in patting him jovially on the back, I somehow brushed against the mike button, chopping off the torrent in mid-cascade. “Oops, how careless of me! Oh, well, Mr. Krome will tell you himself, as soon as I get the helmet off.”

“How long will that take?” demanded General Bond.

“Not more than three or four hours,” I said. “If it doesn’t jam.”

“Can’t wait.” He turned curtly to the Commissioner. “Phone me the patent number as soon as the application is passed to issue.”

“Yes, sir,” the Commissioner replied.

“And you, Mr. Saddle,” said the general sternly, “had better inform Dr. Marchare about the penalties of profiteering against his government. We’ll give him a trial order for ten thousand suits, but if he holds out for more than five thousand dollars per suit, we’ll seize the patent by Eminent Domain.”

“I suppose the good doctor won’t mind taking a loss on a small trial order,” I said reluctantly, “But, of course, on a mass scale, my client would at least have to make expenses, particularly if he adds certain improved features.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” declared the Commissioner. “There’s something funny about this. Look at Krome. Tears are pouring down his cheeks!”

“I’m sure that’s sweat.” I mopped my face hurriedly. “It’s warm in here too, isn’t it? Dr. Marchare intends to air-condition the suit. That’ll bring it up to an even six thousand.”

“Five thousand five hundred,” clipped the general.

I hesitated a moment. “You’re a hard man, general,” I sighed. “But--all right, five thousand five hundred it is.”

And I led Krome out of the room.

Transcriber’s note:

This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe, November 1955 (Vol. 4, No. 4.). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but minor inconsistencies have been retained as printed.