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.

No, I can't tell you how it works—I said before I don't know. Carter only used it once himself. I came in here the day he finished it, just as he was ready to turn it on. He was just putting the finishing touches on it.

"In a few minutes," he told me, "I'll have the answer to a question that may never have been answered before: what is reality? Is the world a thing by itself, and all we know illusion? Why do things grow smaller the farther away from us they appear? Why can't we see more than one side of anything at a time? What happens to the far side of an object; does it cease to exist just because we can't see it? Are objects not present nonexistent? Because artists draw things vanishing to points, does that mean that they really vanish?"

A wack, that's what he was. Nice guy, but sorta screwy. He kept saying more goofy things while he was finishing up the machine, about how he'd figured out that all we knew about vision and drawing and so on must be wrong, and that once he got a look at the real world he'd prove it.

"How about cameras?" I asked him. "Take a picture with a camera and it looks just about the same as a drawing, don't it?"

"That's because cameras are built to take pictures like we're used to seeing them," he said. "Flat, two-dimensional slices of reality, without depth or motion."

"Even 3-D moving pictures?" I asked.

"They're closer to reality," he admitted. "But they are still only cross sections of it. The shutter of a movie camera is closed as much of the time as it is open. What happens in between the times it's open?

"You know," he went on, "people used to think matter and motion were continuous, but scientists have proved that they are