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.”