for anybody trained that way, and I'd throw in the colors,
figures and trees and so on. He did fine. Job came out good; client was
real happy. We made a pretty good amount on the job, enough to keep us
for a coupla months without working afterwards. I took it easy, fishing
and so on, but Carter stayed here in the studio working on his own
stuff. I let him keep an eye on things for me around the place, and just
dropped in now and then to check up.

The guy was nuts on the subject of perspective. I thought he knew all
there was to know about it already, but he claimed _nobody_ knew
anything about it, really. Said he'd been studying it for years, and the
more he learned about it the more there was to learn. He used to cover
big sheets of paper with complicated diagrams trying to prove something
or other to himself. I'd come into the studio and find him with thumb
tacks and strings and stuff all over the place. He'd get big long rulers
and draw lines to various points all over the room, and end up with a
little drawing of a cube about an inch square that anybody coulda made
in a half a minute without all the apparatus. Seemed pretty silly to me.

Then he brought in some books on mathematics and physics and other
things, and a bunch of slide rules, calculators, and junk. He musta been
a pretty smart guy to know how to handle all those things, even if he
was kinda dopey about other things. You know ... women and fishing and
sports and drinking; he was lousy at everything except working those
perspective problems. 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 poi