"Police have identified the man as 78 year old Arthur Macauley from Cardoon, and remain uncertain about the events which led to his death on the rocks at Marris Bay. Mr Macauley lived alone and has no known family. Neighbours say he kept himself to himself and was seen as a harmless eccentric by the local community."
Arthur danced around the workshop, a weird raggedy dance of flailing limbs and uncoordinated joy. Forty six years it taken him, but he'd done it. Forty six years of stupidity, genius, frustration, achievement, tears of anger, tears of joy, dedication, resignation, imagination, repetition, success and failure and, finally, success. Four and half decades of a life given over to one aim. And just when you think time must be running out...
His mother had died when he was a lad, and he became close to his father, near idolised him. The old man was a bit of an inventor, a bit of an entrepreneur, a bit of everything really, and he encouraged his son to be likewise. So in the sixties Arthur had come up with a few ideas for some electronic gadgets that had made him a decent sum of money. When his father died suddenly, and totally unexpectedly, Arthur was only 32, and withdrew into himself. Left with the big house, it's spacious workshop, and more than enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his life, he gave up his business life, gave up on his few friends, and set about finding himself a purpose. He already had a good idea where he might find it.
In the early days of his tinkering about, Arthur noticed something that had played on his mind ever since. He'd accidentally dropped a small battery powered torch into a box that contained a new kind of generator he was working on, was briefly distracted by his assistant, and forgot to remove it when he went back to his experiment. When the new machine was switched on, and bombarded with radio waves, the torch suddenly appeared from the top of the box, apparently floating free of gravity. Arthur was astonished and tried quickly to recreate the phenomenon, but couldn't get it to work. He returned to the task in hand, and the resulting product turned out to be one of his biggest money spinners. But he could never get the torch, or any other object, to lift again, and didn't have the time he needed to pursue it.
Until he found himself without his mentor, and feeling adrift from humanity, but with time and money and a need for goal for his life. If he could figure out how that torch had risen and learn how to make it happen at will, he would have discovered something that would see him immortalised. Levitation, anti-gravity, call it whatever, but here was a phantom worth pursuing, a potential boon to a world he had disconnected himself from.
He set to work, and work, and work. Failure after failure, but he never let the setbacks deflect him from his lifework. It took more than thirty years, but eventually he got another torch to rise. He still didn't understand it, but he could at last dispel the inner doubts that tried to convince him that the original event had been a mirage. Another six years for him to be able to grasp the basic concepts involved and get the experiment to work every time. And now another seven had passed and he'd finally perfected a device that could rise, not from the laboratory conditions of a protected box, but from an open surface, and with enough power to lift the spanner he'd chosen as his trial object. The dance been long in coming.
It took a further 2 years of building ever larger and larger lifters before he was able to reach for the ultimate prize - a machine that could lift a man from the ground and respond to his instructions. False dawns abounded. His body wasn't what it once was, so it was harder to bring the necessary steadiness and concentration to bear. But one day his contraption carried him half a metre into the air, went forward three metres, and set him back down again without too much of a thump. And he knew that this time he was close.
The flights within the workshop, got a bit higher, a bit longer, a bit more controllable, until he reached the point where there was no longer enough space. He would have to take the biggest leap so far and venture outside. Not yet ready to go public - he demanded perfection of himself before that could ever happen - he thought about how best to avoid unwanted eyes.
His nearest neighbours were over four hundred metres away so there was ample privacy for him to undertake some short hops. The lifter emitted little noise, but plenty of light, so it would have be in daylight hours, preferably in bright sunshine. He became more attentive to the weather forecasts.
On clear days dawn flights became his routine. He reached a height above the top of the workshop roof, he flew the whole length of the building. Further adjustments, new refinements, and he was able to make a circuit of the walls from which his innovation had emerged. Then over his home, then several figure of eights around house and workshop. He felt close to being ready to go public, but wanted one more test flight, somewhere beyond the safety of his own property. The flightpath to the cliffs, some kilometre and a half away, need not cross directly over any other homes if he planned his route carefully. He went back to his weather studies.
The morning arrived, he set off at five thirty, the light not yet strong, but more than enough to navigate by. Takeoff went smoothly, he rose to a level that took him well clear of the treeline, and followed a zigzag course to the coast. He had never know such exhilaration.
He should have known. He did know, but should have remembered. If he stayed above the land there wouldn't have been a problem. But joy is a powerful drug, overcoming sense with ease. He let his judgement falter in the moment, allowed himself to drift beyond the cliff edge. The effective change in altitude cancelled out the anti-grav and he was falling before he could make any adjustments to his controls. His final thought, "they never knew...".
"Following the recent unexplained death of Arthur Macauley, investigators have discovered a collection of unusual machines and devices in the large workshop adjacent to the deceased's home. So far nobody has been able to figure out their function, but they have evidently been manufactured by Mr Macauley himself, probably over a period of several decades. Police would like to hear from anyone who has any knowledge of these discoveries, or what Mr Macauley was trying to achieve."
