Personally, I couldn't see much sense to what he was doing. The guy could draw all right already, so I asked him what more did he want? Lemme see if I can remember what he said.

"I'm trying to get at things as they really are, not as they appear," he said. I think those were his words. "Art is an illusion, a bag of tricks. Reality is something else, not what we _think_ it is. Drawings are two-dimensional projections of a world that is not merely three- but four-dimensional, if not more," he said.

* * * * *

Yeh, kind of a crackpot, Carter was. Just on that one subject, though; nice enough guy otherwise. Here, look at some of the drawings he made, working out his formulas. Nice designs, huh? Might make good wall paper or fabric patterns. Real abstract ... that's what people seem to like. See all those little letters scattered around among the lines? Different kinds of vanishing points, they are. Carter claimed the whole world was full of vanishing points. You don't know what a vanishing point is? Lemme see if I can explain. Come over to the window here.

Ya see how that road out there gets smaller and smaller in the distance? Of course the road doesn't really get smaller--it just looks that way. That's what we call a vanishing point in drawing. Simple, isn't it? Never could understand why Carter went to so much trouble working out all those ways to locate vanishing points. Me, I just throw 'em in wherever I need 'em. But Carter claimed that was wrong. Said they were all connected together some way, and he was gonna work out a method to prove it.

Here ... here's a little gadget he made up to help his calculations. Bunch of disks all pivoted together at the center; you're supposed to turn 'em around so the arrows point to the different figures and things. Here's the square root sign, I remember Carter telling me that. This one is the Tangent Function, whatever that means. Log, there, is short for logarithm. Oh, he had a bunch of that scientific stuff in his head all the time; dunno whether he understood it all himself. He built this thing just before he put together the perspective machine there.

Silly-looking gadget, huh? All them pipes and wires and that little cube in the center ... don't try to touch it, it ain't really there. You just think it is. It's what Carter called a teteract, or a cataract ... no, that ain't the right word. Somepin' like that--tesser something or other. There's a picture like it in one of Carter's books. Hurts your eyes to look at it, don't it?

That's what Carter thought was going to make him a lot of fame and money, that perspective machine. I told him nobody'd ever made a drawing machine yet that worked, but he said it wasn't supposed to make drawings. It was just supposed to give people a view of what reality really is, instead of what they think it is. I dunno whether he expected to charge money to look through it, or whether he was gonna look through it himself and make some new kinda drawings and sell 'em.