nts, 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 th