“The illusion of distance.”
“That’s it. That’s what I mean. It’s a matter of optics. Just making a few adjustments, and I think I see the way to manage it.”
“If you do,” I said, “you’ll make an immense fortune. The world will pay anything, absolutely anything to the man who provides it with a new torture. It’s an odd twist in human nature—though I don’t know why I should say that. Oddness is really the normal thing in human nature.”
“But I want a thousand dollars,” said Tim, “or five hundred dollars at the very least. I must try experiments.”
“If you ask your brother——” I said.
“Michael isn’t nice to me about it,” said Tim. “He isn’t nice at all. When I asked him for a thousand dollars he said he’d get it for me on condition that I allowed him to manage my cash register in his own way. But I won’t do that. I know what he wants to do.”
“His idea,” he said, “is to let your invention lapse.”
“I know. The machine will never be made. But I want it to be made. I want to see it working everywhere all over the world. You see I’m always travelling about with the circus, sometimes in America, sometimes in England. We go to a lot of different towns. We go to all the big towns there are. I want to be able to go into shops everywhere, in every town in the world and see my machine there. Don’t you understand?”
“Perfectly,” I said. “Mrs. Ascher explained the whole position to me thoroughly. It’s the artist’s soul in you.”
A look of puzzled annoyance came over the boy’s face. His forehead wrinkled and his fine eyes took an expression of painful doubt as they met mine.