Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (55 page)

That took a while. Harry was still looking scared. That was good too, maybe it would teach him a lesson.

Hermione reached into the pouch Harry had bought her, whispered “water” through her parched throat, took out the bottle and drank in great huge gulps.

And then it was still a while before she could talk again.

“We broke the rules, Harry,” she said in a hoarse voice. “We broke the rules.”

“I…” Harry swallowed. “I still don’t see how, I’ve been
thinking
but -”

“I asked if the Transfiguration was safe and
you answered me!
”

There was a pause.

“That’s it?” Harry said.

She could have screamed.

“Harry, don’t you get it?” she said. “It’s made out of tiny fibers, what if it
unraveled,
who
knows
what could go wrong,
we didn’t ask Professor McGonagall!
Don’t you see what we were doing? We were experimenting with Transfiguration. We were
experimenting
with
Transfiguration!
”

There was another pause.

“Right…” Harry said slowly. “That’s probably one of those things they don’t even bother telling you
not
to do because it’s too obvious. Don’t test brilliant new ideas for Transfiguration by yourselves in an unused classroom without consulting any professors.”

“You could have gotten us killed, Harry!” Hermione knew it wasn’t fair, she’d made the mistake too, but she still felt angry at him, he always sounded so confident and that had dragged her unthinkingly along in his wake. “We could have
spoiled Professor McGonagall’s perfect record!
”

“Yes,” said Harry, “let’s not tell her about this, shall we?”

“We have to stop,” Hermione said. “We have to stop this or we’re going to get hurt. We’re too young, Harry, we can’t do this, not yet.”

A weak grin crossed Harry’s face. “Um, you’re sort of wrong about that.”

And he held out a small pink rectangle, a rubber eraser with a bright metal patch on it.

Hermione stared at it, puzzled.

“Quantum mechanics wasn’t enough,” Harry said. “I had to go all the way down to timeless physics before it took. Had to see the wand as enforcing a
relation
between separate past and future realities, instead of
changing
anything over time - but I did it, Hermione, I saw past the illusion of objects, and I bet there’s not a single other wizard in the world who could have. Even if some Muggleborn knew about timeless formulations of quantum mechanics, it would just be a weird belief about strange distant quantum stuff, they wouldn’t
see
that it was
reality
, accept that the world they knew was just a hallucination. I Transfigured
part
of the eraser without changing the
whole thing.
”

Hermione raised her wand again, pointed it at the eraser.

For a moment anger crossed Harry’s face, but he didn’t make any move to stop her.

“
Finite Incantatem
,” said Hermione. “Check with Professor McGonagall before you try it again.”

Harry nodded, though his face was still a bit tight.

“And we still have to stop,” said Hermione.

“
Why?
” said Harry. “Don’t you see what this
means
, Hermione? Wizards
don’t
know everything! There’s too few of them, even fewer who know any science, they haven’t exhausted the low-hanging fruit -”

“It’s not
safe
,” Hermione said. “If we
can
find out new things it’s even
less
safe! We’re
too young!
We made one big mistake already, next time we could just
die!
”

Then Hermione flinched.

Harry looked away from her, and started taking slow, deep breaths.

“Please don’t try to do it alone, Harry,” Hermione said, her voice trembling. “Please.”

Please don’t make me have to decide whether to tell Professor Flitwick.

There was a long pause.

“So you want us to study,” Harry said. She could tell he was trying to keep the anger out of his voice. “Just study.”

Hermione wasn’t sure if she should say anything, but… “Like you studied, um, timeless physics, right?”

Harry looked back at her.

“That thing you did,” Hermione said, her voice tentative, “it wasn’t because of
our
experiments, right? You could do it because you’d read lots of books.”

Harry opened his mouth, and then he shut it again. There was a frustrated look on his face.

“All right,” Harry said. “How about this. We study, and if I think of anything that seems
really
worth trying, we’ll try it after I ask a professor.”

“Okay,” Hermione said. She didn’t fall over with relief, but only because she was already sitting down.

“Shall we get lunch?” Harry said cautiously.

Hermione nodded. Yes. Lunch sounded good. For real, this time.

She carefully began to push herself off the stone floor, wincing as her body screamed at her -

Harry pointed his wand at her and said “
Wingardium Leviosa.
”

Hermione blinked as the huge weight on her legs diminished to something bearable.

A smile quirked across Harry’s face. “You can
lift
something without being able to Hover it completely,” he said. “Remember that experiment?”

Hermione smiled back helplessly, although she thought she ought to still be angry.

And she started walking back toward the Great Hall, feeling remarkably and wonderfully light on her feet, as Harry carefully kept his wand trained on her.

He only managed to keep it up for five minutes, but it was the thought that counted.

Minerva looked at Dumbledore.

Dumbledore gazed back inquiringly at her. “Did you understand any of that?” the Headmaster said, sounding bemused.

It had been the most complete and utter gibberish that Minerva could ever remember hearing. She was feeling a bit embarrassed about having summoned the Headmaster to hear it, but she’d been given explicit instructions.

“I’m afraid not,” Professor McGonagall said primly.

“So,” Dumbledore said. The silver beard swung away from her, the old wizard’s twinkling gaze looked elsewhere once more. “You suspect you might be able to do something that other wizards can’t do, something we think is impossible.”

The three of them stood within the Headmaster’s private Transfiguration workroom, where the shining phoenix of Dumbledore’s Patronus had told her to bring Harry, moments after her own Patronus had reached him. Light shone down through the skylights and illuminated the great seven-pointed alchemical diagram drawn in the center of the circular room, showing it to be a little dusty, which saddened Minerva. Transfiguration research was one of Dumbledore’s great enjoyments, and she’d known how pressed for time he’d been lately, but not that he was
this
pressed.

And now Harry Potter was going to waste even more of the Headmaster’s time. But she certainly couldn’t blame
Harry
for that. He’d done the proper thing in coming to her to say that he’d had an idea for doing something in Transfiguration that was currently believed to be impossible, and she herself had done exactly what she’d been told to do: she’d ordered Harry to be quiet and not discuss anything with her until she had consulted the Headmaster and they’d finished moving to a secure location.

If Harry had started out by saying what
specifically
he thought he could do, she wouldn’t have bothered.

“Look, I know it’s hard to explain,” Harry said, sounding a little embarrassed. “What it adds up to is that what you believe conflicts with what scientists believe, in a case where I’d genuinely expect scientists to know more than wizards.”

Minerva would have sighed out loud, if Dumbledore hadn’t seemed to be taking the whole thing very seriously.

Harry’s idea stemmed from simple ignorance, nothing more. If you changed half of a metal ball into glass, the
whole ball
had a different Form. To change the part
was
to change the whole, and that meant removing the whole Form and replacing it with a different one. What would it even
mean
to Transfigure only half of a metal ball? That the metal ball
as a whole
had the same Form as before, but
half
that ball now had a different Form?

“Mr. Potter,” said Professor McGonagall, “what you want to do isn’t just impossible, it’s
illogical.
If you change half of something, you
did
change the whole.”

“Indeed,” said Dumbledore. “But Harry is the hero, so he may be able to do things that are logically impossible.”

Minerva would have rolled her eyes, if she hadn’t gone numb a long time ago.

“Supposing it
was
possible,” said Dumbledore, “can you think of any reason why the results would differ in any way from ordinary Transfiguration?”

Minerva frowned. The fact that the concept was literally unimaginable was presenting her with some difficulty, but she tried to take it at face value. A Transfiguration imposed on only half of a metal ball…

“Strange things happening at the interface?” said Minerva. “But that should be no different than Transfiguring the object as a whole, into a Form with two different parts…”

Dumbledore nodded. “That is my own thought as well. And Harry, if your theory is correct, it implies that what you want to do is
exactly
like any other Transfiguration, only applied to a part of the subject rather than the whole? No changes
at all?
”

“Yes,” Harry said firmly. “That’s the whole point.”

Dumbledore looked at her again. “Minerva, can you think of any reason whatsoever why that would be dangerous?”

“No,” said Minerva, after she had finished searching through her memory.

“Likewise myself,” said the Headmaster. “All right, then, since this ought to be exactly analogous to ordinary Transfiguration in all respects, and since we cannot think of any reason whatsoever why it would be dangerous, I think that the second degree of caution will suffice.”

Minerva was surprised, but she didn’t object. Dumbledore was by far her senior in Transfiguration, and he had tried literally thousands of new Transfigurations without ever choosing a degree of caution that was too low. He had used Transfiguration
in combat
and he was
still alive.
If the Headmaster thought the second degree was enough, it was enough.

That Harry was certainly going to fail was, of course, completely irrelevant.

The two of them started setting up the wards and detection webs. The most important web was the one that checked to make sure no Transfigured material had entered the air. Harry would be enclosed in a separate shell of force with its own air supply just to be certain, only his wand allowed to leave the shield, and the interface tight. They were inside Hogwarts so they couldn’t automatically Apparate out any material that showed signs of spontaneous combustion, but they could launch it out a skylight almost as fast, the windows all folded outward for exactly that reason. Harry himself would go out a different skylight at the first sign of trouble.

Harry watched them working, his face looking a little frightened.

“Don’t worry,” said Professor McGonagall in the middle of her running description, “this almost certainly won’t be necessary, Mr. Potter. If we
expected
anything to go wrong you would not be allowed to try. It’s just ordinary precautions for any Transfiguration no one has ever tried before.”

Harry swallowed and nodded.

And a few minutes later, Harry was strapped into the safety chair and resting his wand against a metal ball - one that, based on his current test scores, should have been too large for him to Transfigure in less than thirty minutes.

And a few minutes after
that,
Minerva was leaning against the wall, feeling faint.

There was a small patch of glass on the ball where Harry’s wand had rested.

Harry didn’t say
I told you so,
but the smug look on his sweating face said it for him.

Dumbledore was casting analytic Charms on the ball, looking more and more intrigued by the moment. Thirty years had melted off his face.

“Fascinating,” said Dumbledore. “It’s exactly as he claimed. He simply Transfigured a part of the subject without Transfiguring the whole. You say it’s really just a conceptual limitation, Harry?”

“Yes,” Harry said, “but a deep one, just knowing it had to be a conceptual limitation wasn’t enough. I had to suppress the part of my mind that was making the error and think instead about the underlying reality that scientists figured out.”

“Truly fascinating,” Dumbledore said. “I take it that for any other wizard to do the same would require months of study if they could do it at all? And may I ask you to partially Transfigure some other subjects?”

“Probably yes and of course,” Harry said.

Half an hour later, Minerva was feeling equally bewildered, but considerably reassured about the safety issues.

It
was
the same, aside from being logically impossible.

“I believe that’s enough, Headmaster,” Minerva said finally. “I suspect partial Transfiguration is more tiring than the ordinary sort.”

“Getting less so with practice,” said the exhausted and pale boy, voice unsteady, “but yeah, you’ve got that right.”

The process of extracting Harry from the wards took another minute, and then Minerva escorted him to a much more comfortable chair, and Dumbledore produced an ice-cream soda.

“
Congratulations
, Mr. Potter!” said Professor McGonagall, and meant it. She would have bet almost anything against that working.

“Congratulations indeed,” said Dumbledore. “Even I did not make any original discoveries in Transfiguration before the age of fourteen. Not since the day of Dorotea Senjak has any genius flowered so early.”

“Thanks,” Harry said, sounding a little surprised.

“Nonetheless,” Dumbledore said thoughtfully, “I think it would be most wise to keep this happy event a secret, at least for now. Harry, did you discuss your idea with any other person before you spoke to Professor McGonagall?”