n
something in the outer laboratory caught his ever-observant eye.

"Carter!" he roared. "Is that a synobasical interphasometer in the
positronic flow? Fool! What sort of measurements do you expect to make
when your measuring instrument itself is part of the experiment? Take it
out and start over!"

He rushed away toward the unfortunate technician. I settled idly back in
my chair and stared about the small laboratory, whose walls had seen so
many marvels. The latest, the attitudinizor, lay carelessly on the
table, dropped there by the professor after his analysis of the mass
viewpoint of the pedestrians in the street below.

I picked up the device and fell to examining its construction. Of course
this was utterly beyond me, for no ordinary engineer can hope to grasp
the intricacies of a van Manderpootz concept. So, after a puzzled but
admiring survey of its infinitely delicate wires and grids and lenses, I
made the obvious move. I put it on.

My first thought was the street, but since the evening was well along,
the walk below the window was deserted. Back in my chair again, I sat
musing idly when a faint sound that was not the rumbling of the
professor's voice attracted my attention. I identified it shortly as the
buzzing of a heavy fly, butting its head stupidly against the pane of
glass that separated the small laboratory from the large room beyond. I
wondered casually what the viewpoint of a fly was like, and ended by
flashing the light on the creature.

For some moments I saw nothing other than I had been seeing right along
from my own personal point of view, because, as van Manderpootz
explained later, the psychons from the miserable brain of a fly are too
few to produce any but the vaguest of impressions. But gradually I
became aware of a picture, a queer and indescribable scene.

Flies are color-blind. That was my first impression, for the world was a
dull panorama of greys and whites and blacks. Flies are extremely
nearsighted; when I had finally identified the scene as the interior of
the familiar room, I discovered that it seemed enormous to the insect,
whose vision did not extend more than six feet, though it did take in
almost a complete sphere, so that the creature could see practically in
all directions at once. But perhaps the most astonishing thing, though I
did not think of it until later, was that the compound eye of the
insect, did not convey to it the impression of a vast number of separate
p