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 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.