"The Diploids" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

He touched the small flesh-colored bandage on his scratch, looking at the reflection in a window. “Hardly worth going back. All we’d prove is that someone was shooting, and they know that already.”



THEY walked on together through the shade of the tall trees that lined the avenue. “When your Revision Committee for the Patent Code testifies before Congress,” he said, remembering what he had been saying, “you should be spokesman in that tight green and gold suit you’re wearing. They’d agree to anything.”

She picked up the thread. “ ‘Gentlemen,’ I’ll say—”

“Undulating slightly,” he added.

“Invention has become a form of restriction. The law has been diverted from—”

“Seduced from!”

“Seduced from its original intention, which was to guarantee sufficient profits to the inventor to encourage and stimulate invention. Instead, research now has as its main purpose the desire to invent something first and patent it first, not for use, but to prevent its use, to preserve the status quo for the industry, financing the research, by preventing its use by competitors.”

A small tube elevator whooshed them up to the sixtieth floor, “Lawyers’ Row.” They were at the door of his office.

PAUL BREDEN

PATENT LAW

Nadine’s office was further down the corridor. Paul pushed his door open, hoping to extend their lunch time together a little more, beguiling her with the imaginary speech. “At this point your claque in the gallery claps and cheers and stomps, and while they are being ejected you pull out your compact and put on more lipstick.”

They walked into the inner office past the secretary, ignoring the fact that lunch was over and they both had work to do. Nadine continued the speech, gesticulating with mock earnestness. He considered her from a standpoint of an imaginary audience of lascivious Congressmen. She was beautiful—yes, but too perfectly dressed, too crisp and finished and unapproachable. It was probably an effect carefully calculated to keep the minds of her business associates on the subject of business.

“You should muss your hair a little,” he interrupted, getting a frown for his efforts.

“The competition, not to be outdone, pours its money into research to find other ways of doing what it needs done rather than the way the patent excludes them from. This, gentlemen, is…”

He looked at her with a familiar question coming: up in his mind, quickening his pulse. She probably had a private life of friends and lovers, but he had never dared let himself approach that side of her, although they had known each other for six months. She could choose among many men—men without his handicap—yet she seemed glad to be with him as a law collaborator, and welcomed any free time they could escape from business lunches to eat together. Yet…

“… does not make the inventor any richer, for he draws only his research salary from his company. Actually, the prime result is duplication of research, so that instead of each day bringing hundreds of brilliant new inventions, the patent office is flooded daily with hundreds of brilliant new ways of doing the same damned thing, each one tying up the patent office with its red tape—each one no better than the other!”

He sat down behind his desk and propped his elbows on it, smiling. “Add this. ‘There are nine and ninety ways —Of constructing tribal lays, And every —Single—One—Of them—Is right!’”

“As Kipling wrote—” she began, then stopped to frown at him. “Would Congressmen know that lays are a form of poetry?”

He laughed. “All the better if they don’t.” It was not often they had lunch together or extended their lunch hours like this. They were too busy. She probably would have been surprised to learn how much these occasional lunches meant to him.

The televiewer chimed.



PAUL muttered a “damn,”, reaching for the right phone, and Nadine gave him a farewell salute and moved toward the door. “Wait a minute,” he asked her, “and we’ll see who this jerk is.” He pushed a button and a screen on the wall opposite him sprang to life in color, showing a lean old man in a snappy pearl gray suit, waiting with restless impatience. “Yardly Devon.” Breden identified him without pleasure, remembering the things Devon had said before switching off the last time they had seen each other.

“His last two inventions were not patentable, Nadine, and I told him so, but he insisted I try to get patents on them anyhow. When they were rejected he claimed I’d sabotaged them. He probably took them to another consultant, got the same opinion, and wants to apologize now.” He indicated the chair beside the desk. “Sit there a minute. You’re out of range of the scanner.”

She smiled and sat down. The bell chimed again impatiently, and Breden switched on the scanner that put him on Devon’s screen. “Yes?”