Clutching his notebook full of sketches and ideas arising therefrom, Charles intended to lay them before his father and persuade him to pay attention because he felt sure that with his fathers help the two of them might do something worthwhile.
Alright so the tachyon drive idea was perhaps a bit far fetched but the concept was valid even if the look of the thing was a bit Dan Dare - Charles was an avid follower of the Eagle comic that always featured the intrepid space man in full colour on the front page.
During the war Mr Ramsey had been very much involved with degaussing, using experimental equipment made necessary by the German magnetic mines which had proved to be such a threat especially in river estuaries. So he had gathered quite an array of various magnets both normal and electro magnetic and used them to investigate how they could produce different shaped fields.
A lot of them were still in his lab stored on a shelf under a bench which held a display device that used iron filings to produce fields that could be photographed. Charles had often played with this setup when he was a boy still fascinated with magnetism thanks to a Christmas gift which he'd been very fond of until it got broken or lost after a year or two.
Recently his physics studies had re ignited those memories and he'd been intending to wait for a chance to delve amongst his fathers piles of discarded magnetic field generators to see if he could duplicate some kind of spherical field that could be shaped by extending the sphere into a teardrop.
The Eagle comic's centre fold illustration of ZETA the English experimental thermo nuclear assembly at Harwell had given Charles the idea that something similar might be a way to control sub atomic particles which could possibly create a hyper drive but it was too ambitious for a lone inventor to build. Nevertheless he'd not forgotten the concept as magnetic confinement of plasma was still very much at the forefront of physics research.
So feeling lucky today and as his father was away at a conference, Charles dug out some devices and laid them out on a convenient bench top, checked the connections and before attempting to switch his experiment on, he laid out all his notes and diagrams relevant to what he was about to attempt so that later on, if it worked, he'd made it easy for his father to understand.
Mrs Ramsey was working in her kitchen preparing lunch for herself and her son and was about to call for him when there came a tremendous BANG! followed by an almost eerie silence that was quickly dispelled by the familiar background sounds of suburban gardens such as a distant lawnmower, birds singing, almost as if the noise had never happened.
"One of those damn Air Force jets" she said to herself before calling "Charles? Lunch is on the table dear."
No response perhaps he was out in the garden at the end of which was the garage he could often be found in. She went out to look but there was no sign of him there, perhaps he'd gone off on his bike though it was unusual for him to miss meals, he usually was at the table waiting for them. Then she heard the front door open.
"Hello dear, oh good, lunch on the table? I'm starving, there was no break at the conference which was a waste of time anyway. Where's Charles?"
When she told him about the loud bang, his face went white and he rushed off to the laboratory which Mrs Ramsey hadn't done because she was forbidden to enter in case of an unforeseen accident if an experiment went wrong. It was a sensible caveat.
George Ramsey saw the large hole in one wall and noted the smoking ruins of some equipment on he bench top and a lot of notes and drawings which Charles had obviously spread out and weighted down to keep them in place. He gathered these up being careful to note which had been placed where, before going back to his wife and saying "call the police Helen there's been an accident. I think Charles may be missing."
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