During the next ten days I wrote and re-wrote. I consulted with Marchare on several occasions, and I worked closely with Eskew to make sure that his drawings would be comprehensible to a man from Mars--or a patent examiner. Even at lunch Susan, our secretary, and I talked about the diving suit and hardly anything else. I ate, slept, and breathed the suit. I became convinced that it was going to be a perfect application. The Patent Office wouldn’t get to first base with its exotic logic this time. Susan was a gem. She never even frowned when I changed my mind several times about how best to drive home a telling point. She just tore up the old copy and made a new one from my dictation. Sometimes, though, she had a funny little half-smile on her face as though she knew something which I didn’t. I asked her about it once. She didn’t say a word, just reached over and patted me on top of the head. Somehow it made me feel like a Pekinese. But I refused to let it worry me. I was too busy creating a perfect patent specification. The opening paragraph in my specification read: * * * * * _This invention relates to a suit of apparel, particularly designed for the protection of a diver, and has for its object to provide a diving suit of novel construction that may be comfortably worn by a person, be capable of yielding at all the joints of the wearer’s body, be earthproof and airtight, be self-contained as to air supply, be light, strong, and durable, afford means for the descent of a diver in various depths of dirt, and enable the deepground diver to move around freely through rock, stone, and earth of varying composition._ The final draft consisted of seven pages of drawings, ten pages of spec, and twenty-eight claims. I sat at my desk for a good thirty minutes pridefully staring at the lovely stack of papers. I read over some of the more brilliant passages, rolling the words on my tongue, amazed at what a clear picture they painted. Convinced that it was now a masterpiece of logic and persuasiveness, I took it in for Spardleton’s approval. He picked it up and began to read. I waited confidently, convinced that he could hardly fail to see in it the sure hand of genius. He finished it far more rapidly than I would have thought possible. “_Um_,” he said, tossing it back to me, “It’ll do. File it.” Susan made out a check for thirty-eight dollars and I mailed the whole mess to the Patent Office.