Patreon or PayPal Me keeps this site and its author alive. Thank you. |
Stories from the Verse
In Verse Proportion
Chapter 20: Slade 174
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 178
Breakfast offered eggs, but Slade noticed that some of the students didn’t eat them so he stuck with the pancake-like bread products with some sort of sugary syrup. Over breakfast he was introduced to a professor from the law school. Establishing a language link with the teaching assistant he explained what he wanted.
The professor got very excited, but as Slade figured out the reason for this excitement he was not encouraged. It seemed that there was no precedent for an alien holding a patent, so what thrilled the law professor was the opportunity to make new law--a process that was going to take years, possibly decades. Slade responded that he was going to need money a lot sooner than that, and that even a delay of months would be difficult.
“Let me think about it,” the professor said.
“You do that,” Slade replied.
Shella had been listening, and as they returned to their rooms she said, “We’ll come up with something. We always do.”
Slade nodded, but he wasn’t fully convinced. There was some sense to the problem--after all, he was pretty sure that back home if someone claimed that a gorilla or a chimpanzee or a dolphin or some other highly intelligent animal had invented something, the government wouldn’t issue a patent in the name of the animal. He didn’t think this was the same, but then, on some level it was the same: he and Shella weren’t actually “people” by the definition used in this world, and legal definitions tended to be rather narrow. They might be stuck.
Well, perhaps someone would come up with a solution.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with twenty other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #432: Whole New Worlds. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
