"This is very nice indeed," Hermione's mother said approvingly as she looked around the hotel room.
"The University has an arrangement with this hotel," Doctor Langham commented. "We sometimes have guest lecturers or other visitors staying for a few days, and they often stay here. It's a good hotel. You shouldn't have any problems but if you do, please let me know."
"I'm sure we'll be fine, thank you, Jerry," she replied with a smile. "Hermione, is your room all right?"
"Yes, thank you, Mummy," Hermione nodded. She hadn't been in many hotels in her life and was finding this entire experience great fun. "It has a nice view of the city, and the bed looks very comfortable."
They'd left home very early that morning, at around half past six, and she'd made sure to go to bed earlier than usual too so she wouldn't be so tired she couldn't enjoy the day. She'd had butterflies in her stomach most of the way down the motorway as she knew they were going to have a lot more people listening to them while trying to learn what was behind the H-Field than they'd experienced so far. It had rather caught up with her just how extensive the whole affair was becoming the night before and she'd spent an hour cuddling Mr Boots and having a very discreet mild panic attack. Eventually, though, her mind had reasserted itself over her emotions and she'd calmed down.
The whole thing was ultimately because she had put in the initial work and made the first discovery. While it was expanding more than she'd expected to begin with, and that was a touch overwhelming if she let it be, at the same time it was immensely satisfying to know that people were taking her work seriously, and seemed to think her book was reasonably good. She respected everyone she'd met so far, especially Doctor Langham and Doctor Younan, so having them respect her in return was nice.
And, of course, Professor Hawking of all people had listened to her and approved of her progress! That was not something she was going to forget very quickly.
Hopefully they wouldn't be upset when she told them some of the rest of what she'd discovered but so far hadn't mentioned. They'd seemed so excited by what she had shown them that she felt that they'd probably be all right about it.
"We've got about an hour and a half before we have to go over to the lecture hall," Doctor Langham continued after her mother had come back from putting her suitcase on her own bed. They had an entire suite for themselves, with three bedrooms and a decent sized sitting room, plus two bathrooms. Her father was in one of the latter at the moment. "I'd suggest that if you want to get a bite to eat now would be the ideal time. The restaurant here is excellent and the department is paying, so feel free to catch a late breakfast if you'd like."
"I could do with some coffee," her mother commented with a nod. "And perhaps a roll with something on it?"
"I'm quite hungry too," Hermione noted. "We didn't eat much breakfast and that was hours ago."
"Are we having second breakfast, then?" her father said as he came out of the bathroom, turning the light out on the way. He walked over to join them. "That sounds like an excellent idea, even if we're not hobbits."
Hermione giggled and Doctor Langham looked amused. "So it would seem," her mother said, shaking her head. "Do try to keep the silly jokes to a minimum, dear. We're trying to be professional."
"I'll have you know I can be professional and make silly jokes, love," her father retorted, winking at Hermione. "It's a well-honed skill, passed down from father to son."
"Your father was even more annoying than you are sometimes," her mother sighed. "But I knew that and still married you, so I can only blame myself."
He laughed and kissed her on the cheek. "True enough. Well, shall we see what awaits us in the restaurant?"
"I just need to quickly freshen up, I'll be right back," she replied, before disappearing into the bathroom. Hermione went into her own room and retrieved her coat, looked out the window at the view from six floors up, smiled to herself, and returned just as her mother did.
"Ready, Hermione?" she asked.
"Ready, Mummy." Hermione nodded, following as her parents and Doctor Langham left the suite and walked towards the lifts. Soon they were being shown to a table in the restaurant downstairs, and handed breakfast menus. Only ten minutes after that she was enjoying an egg on toast and some really good bacon.
Doctor Langham, who was sipping from a cup of coffee, pulled out a notebook and flipped through it with one hand. "We've spent some time working out the best sequence of operations," he said a moment later, causing the other three to look at him. "I've got a schedule in my office at the department. If you have any problems with it, we can move things around as necessary, of course. But I think it should work out fairly well. We've also left a day uncommitted in case anything unusual comes up during the course of events." He looked around at them, then shook his head with a rueful grin. "Unusual being rather subject to definition, of course…"
"I'm looking forward to it, Doctor," Hermione told him with complete sincerity. "Even if it is a little overwhelming when I think too hard about it."
"I can't help feeling much the same, Hermione," he assured her. "But I also am looking forward to it."
She smiled, then went back to eating. Not long afterward they'd finished their small meal, had drinks, and revisited their suite to use the facilities. By half past ten they were in her father's car heading back to the university. Doctor Langham leaned forward from where he was sitting next to Hermione in the back and handed her mother a small plastic card. "This is a staff parking pass I arranged for you," he said. "If you could put it in the corner of the windscreen? Yes, perfect. Michael, take the next left up ahead, where it says staff only, and drive around to the rear of the building. There should be some free spaces back there."
"All right," her father replied, indicating and turning at the junction. He slowly drove along the access road, past several doors with various signs on, eventually arriving at a small car park with about a dozen vehicles in it, along with as many free spaces. Only a few moment later he turned the ignition off.
"Plenty of time," Doctor Langham commented as he looked at his watch. "The lecture hall is in that building right in front of us, on the first floor." All of them got out and Hermione's father locked the car, then they followed the parapsychologist as he strode across the car park towards the large building and slid a plastic pass through a card reader beside the door. It beeped and clicked, following which he pulled the door open and stood to the side. "After you," he said, waving them through.
Inside they approached the lift at the end of the short corridor, around a corner, where he prodded the up button. The doors opened immediately so they all got in. Two minutes later they arrived a floor up and halfway back towards the front of the building, at a set of double doors. Hermione could sense a surprisingly large number of people inside what was a quite big room, which was confirmed when he pushed one half of the door open and held it for them. Once they were through, he closed the door again. Doctor Younan was waiting for them.
"Any stragglers left?" Doctor Langham queried. Doctor Younan shook his head.
"No, everyone's here."
"Good. Lock the door, and let's get on with things," Doctor Langham grinned, rubbing his hands together. "Oh, there's going to be some hilarious expressions in a couple of minutes..."
Doctor Younan looked very amused, and Hermione giggled a little.
"Your computer is set up at the front, by the way, Hermione," the electronics engineer remarked as he turned to her. They'd stopped off before going to the hotel to drop the computer and her devices off, and pick up Doctor Langham. She had her school backpack with her which contained some notebooks, a copy of her own book, and a few other things she thought might be useful.
"Thank you," she replied politely, making him smile.
The small party trooped down the shallow stairs to the front of the room, past nearly forty people who watched them with interest. They were all clustered in the first few rows of seats, the whole room being laid out in rising tiers towards the back, so everyone could get a good view of anyone at the front. Hermione's BBC Master was sitting on a table, next to several chairs and a lecture podium. Behind the table was a large whiteboard, which seemed to be able to be moved up and down. She examined the whole thing with great interest, trying to ignore all the eyes boring into her back. Which wasn't easy as she could literally feel their attention and knew exactly how many people were staring at her.
This was oddly overwhelming compared to the previous visits. She took a couple of deep breaths before sitting between her parents when they reached the front, Doctor Younan sitting next to her father, and Doctor Langham walking behind the podium and looking up at the assembled multitude.
"Good morning," he began, casting his gaze around the group of people. "We will be able to properly introduce everyone later when we get to work, but for this initial presentation, we can probably ignore most of the social niceties." He turned to Hermione and her parents. "Sitting at the front here next to Doctor Younan are Michael, Hermione, and Helen Granger respectively, as I'm sure you all realized. They have kindly agreed to be at our beck and call for the rest of the week, so please try to make their time here pleasant and don't get too carried away, all right?" Hermione grinned slightly as there was a ripple of laughter.
"Granger family, please meet the entirety of the new Oxford University Department of Psionic Research," Doctor Langham went on, waving a hand at the people on the seats. Hermione looked them over and saw a number of smiles, a couple of frowns, and quite a lot of mildly confused expressions. The feeling of them was much the same, although she could sense a lot of suppressed excitement as well. "We have experts in every discipline we thought likely to be required, and everyone is very invested in this new field, so I think that we're going to have an interesting time this week. And hopefully a rewarding one. If we can work out what Psionics actually is I suspect the Vice Chancellor would be pleased as well." He smiled as Doctor Younan chuckled, something several other people did too.
"So, with that out of the way, let's begin. As you all know, Michael Granger contacted me a while ago, and we ended up with a full day of what turned out to be some of the most extraordinary evidence for an entirely new field of study in history, in my view. We went into the day with statistically useful but barely above random noise levels of evidence, and ended it with absolute proof of an effect that completely defies current scientific understanding in almost every way one can imagine. Even now I'm shocked by quite how quickly my own field of study has been completely upended, and I expect much the same is true of everyone else who was present." The parapsychologist looked around at his original colleagues, all of whom nodded agreement.
"All of you have seen the records of our experiments that day, all the evidence we collected, the video recordings, and so on. Even so, there's bound to be a certain amount of skepticism among those of you who didn't directly witness what went on in that session, hence this meeting. There's nothing quite as effective as the evidence of your own eyes, as unscientific as that sometimes can be."
He paused, looking around, while everyone hung on his words. Hermione thought to herself that he was a good speaker, and seemed to have a knack for this sort of thing. "So, then. To set the minds of everyone at ease and show that there is a real phenomenon involved, one that can't be explained by current theories, we're going to see a number of ad-hoc experiments and demonstrations. Both of practical on-demand telekinesis, and of the results of Miss Granger's own theories, taken to experimentally valid conclusions. Hopefully this will settle any arguments that might remain that there could be some trivial explanation for a very non-trivial discovery."
Turning to Hermione's father, while everyone present watched extremely closely, he said, "Michael? If you would." He pointed at the marker pen on the podium in front of him, which was clearly visible to the whole group of people. Hermione's father nodded agreeably, and a moment later the pen floated into the air.
The shocked gasp that nearly everyone who hadn't been present the first time emitted was so synchronized, Hermione thought with great amusement, that it was as if they'd practiced.
"Good god," one of the older scientists she'd never met said with a completely stunned look on his face.
Doctor Langham waved his hand under the pen, then above it. "You will note the absence of any visible means of support," he said into the quiet. "I assure you there is no trickery here. We don't have magnets in the podium, as I can show." He moved the wooden construction several feet to the side, without making the pen even bobble in its flight. "Nor is there a string. It's just hanging there in mid air in exactly the same way bricks don't." He smiled a little as Hermione giggled. "Could you show them, Michael?"
Her father obligingly floated the marker towards the group staring at it, several of them flinching a little, before catching themselves and leaning forward. One of the students tried grabbing it as it passed and looked amazed when he succeeded, her father letting him take it. Examining the pen, he shook his head after a few seconds, as those around him leaned over or partially stood to stare at it as well. "It's just a pen," he reported, his voice shaky.
"Toss it back," Doctor Langham commented. The student flipped it towards him, gaping when it stopped dead, then hung there again. A moment later it started flipping end over end, quite slowly, and orbiting around a yard diameter circle. Hermione's father was smiling to himself and showed no sign of any effort at all.
"It might still be some sort of trick, Jack," the student's companion commented, although he didn't look convinced by his own words. "I have no idea how, but perhaps the pen is rigged."
"It looked and felt like a normal whiteboard marker," Jack replied, looking at him, then back to the pen.
"Feel free to provide your own object, Mr Krantz," Doctor Langham said to the other student, who thought for a moment, then put his hand into his pocket and retrieved a mechanical pencil.
"How about this?" he asked, holding it up, then twitched violently when it lifted out of his hand and started circling his head. He watched it open-mouthed, as did everyone else.
"Holy…" he mumbled, the word loud in the silence.
"Convinced?" Doctor Langham asked calmly, his eyes twinkling. "Or does anyone else want to try?"
A rubber came flying from somewhere at the back and Hermione reflexively caught it, the block of elastic material stopping dead before it went more than about six feet. "You dropped your rubber, Doctor Blakely," she said, grinning at the semiconductor physicist, who was looking highly amused.
"That is absolutely unbelievable," someone else breathed. "How can it even work?"
"That is one of the many, many things about this entire situation we're here to try to determine," Doctor Langham stated, looking immensely pleased with the whole thing. "We have an opportunity the likes of nothing I can think of ever happening before, and I intend to make the most of it, wherever it takes us. I suspect I speak for all of us in that."
"I'm certainly convinced that something bizarre is happening, and I have no explanation at all for it," Jack said, sounding like he was having trouble breathing for a moment. "I have more questions than I think I can even comprehend." Looking around Hermione could see this comment was mirrored on the faces of most of them, the only exceptions being those who'd seen it the last time, and even they were largely nodding.
"The only one who does have any real insight so far into how telekinesis works is Miss Granger, who not only discovered it in an act of incredible serendipity, but possessed the remarkable intuition to realize that something unusual was happening and the sheer determination to investigate it," Doctor Langham replied, making Hermione go red. "Something that proves she is indeed possessed of the scientific approach to research, and something I highly commend her for. You have all, or most of you have, read her extraordinary thesis on her discovery of what she has termed the H-Field, and how she has patiently spent more than two solid years methodically performing rigorous experiments to determine how it functions and what can be achieved through manipulation of it. She has successfully shown that telekinesis is one practical application of whatever it truly is that underpins the H-Field, and then extended that achievement into the invention and use of the H-Field Operator, or HOP."
He took a breath, as everyone kept dead silent and listened intently. "Even at such a young age, she has managed to produce a body of work that stands up against anything I have ever seen. Several others have commented the same thing. While we, even Miss Granger, don't yet know what the H-Field is, thanks to her we know it exists, is a real thing, and can be modified and utilized to produce effects that go beyond anything currently known to science. I personally suspect it underlies almost, if not all, of the effects and phenomena I have spent my career to date trying to replicate, but for reasons we don't know have never been able to truly manage. Somehow, possibly purely through sheer determination, Miss Granger succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of people such as myself, and I can only applaud her for that. And she's validated my field better than I could possibly have managed, which I have to admit is immensely gratifying." He smiled widely as Hermione blushed again. This was almost too much praise and it was making her feel that she didn't deserve it.
"Hermione, if you'd like to demonstrate what a complex HOP can produce?" he invited, turning to her. She nodded and got up, then walked over to the table on which her computer sat. "And if you could describe your work as well, please?"
She swallowed, then nodded again. "Hello," she said, turning to the crowd, after a quick look at her parents. Her mother smiled encouragingly and her father grinned at her. "As Doctor Langham said, I'm Hermione Granger and this is all my fault."
Doctor Blakely laughed for a moment then went quiet, while several of the scientists smiled. All of them were watching her and it was a little overwhelming, but she took a breath and continued. They were listening and they were all here to learn about what she'd done, so all she had to do was explain it. That was rather the point after all. "Doctor Langham has slightly got the sequence of discoveries mixed up in his introduction," she said, glancing apologetically at the parapsychologist. "I discovered telekinesis first, and as a result of that discovered the existence of the H-Field when I was attempting to work out how I was doing what I was doing. The HOP designs were a logical outgrowth of the second discovery after I investigated the H-Field more deeply. I had an epiphany one night when I was working on an electronics project and suddenly realized that the H-Field was remarkably compatible with electronic theory."
Feeling more comfortable as she spoke, she moved to stand directly in front of the computer, and with greater confidence due to the way everyone was listening carefully, went on, "There appear to be limits to how much mass one can act on with telekinesis directly, unaided. That limit increases with practice, I found, but I doubt it can ever be unlimited. However, what I observed during my experiments was that every operation that tapped the H-Field left an imprint, or what I tend to think of as a knot, in the field itself. That appears in fact to be part of how it interacts with everything else. I also observed that by using the correct technique, these knots could be directly manipulated, and even specifically designed. My epiphany came when I put together this fact and the concept of the field effect transistor. It led me to my first HOP design, which was an amplifier for telekinetic operations."
Growing more animated, she waved her hands a little, sketching out the concept as she explained it. "A field effect transistor has a control terminal, the gate, which consumes essentially no power, but controls the flow of electrons between the source and the drain. This allows a very small signal to act on a much larger one, providing the ability to amplify a signal, or control a voltage, as in a switch. I realized that in theory, if I was right, I could use the same basic concept to create an H-Field Operator that did exactly the same thing but controlling the H-Field directly. The fascinating thing about it is that it is made from the H-Field itself. My first experiment along these lines was… slightly more dramatic than I expected. But it did prove the concept was sound." The girl looked at her father, who shook his head with a look of fond exasperation. "The hole is still in the ceiling and I was only able to get half the pencil out of the beam," she added a little weakly.
"But it did work!" she added more cheerfully, then became aware that everyone other than her parents was staring rather oddly at her.
Doctor Langham opened his mouth, then closed it again, apparently thinking better of whatever it had been that he'd been about to say. "All of this is in my book," she went on, turning back to the audience. "Although I didn't go into details about the pencil. Or the boulders…" She shrugged a little. "Those aren't really important. However, from that first HOP, I've steadily improved the process of designing more complex ones, and arrays of them, to perform specific tasks other than simply acting as amplifiers. Since they map so well to electronic functions I've spent quite a lot of time designing a method to interface a HOP array to an electronic device, specifically my computer. The HOP array is excellent at doing certain tasks that are beyond the electronics at present, and vice versa. Although I have been working on a preliminary design for a HOP-based computer, having shown that basic logic circuits are quite straightforward. It's still some way off though, as it's quite complicated. For now, I'm pleased with what I have managed to make."
She flipped the power switch with her mind, and stepped to the side. The holographic screen and projected keyboard sprang into life after the usual double beep and a brief buzz from the floppy disk drive as it loaded the programs.
"Bloody hell," someone said almost conversationally.
"It worked even better than I'd hoped for," she said happily, reaching out and typing on the keyboard. "Of course this is still only a prototype, and I have to make each HOP by hand, so to speak, but I think it's got some interesting promise. The longer term project is a fully interactive holographic projected display, and these are essentially proof of concept of some of the elements required."
"That is absolutely amazing," one of the students said in a strange voice. "Would you mind if I had a closer look?"
"Please help yourself," she invited, moving out of the way. He got up and came down to the front, standing at the table and tentatively reaching out to the keyboard. Prodding it carefully, he shook his head in amazement at the tactile feedback, before playing with it for a few seconds. He then waved his hand through the display and grinned.
"This alone makes it worthwhile," he remarked. "Thank you, Miss Granger."
"You're welcome," she replied politely, waiting until he'd sat down before looking at the rest of them. "Are there any questions so far?"
A woman held up her hand, and feeling a bit like this was a dream, Hermione pointed at her. "Have you designed anything else of this nature?" the scientist asked. "Clearly you have to have created a method to generate electromagnetic energy from the H-Field, which would be necessary to produce the illuminated pixels. How much energy can in fact be produced by this method?"
"I don't know what the upper limit is, and I suspect that there may not in fact be one," Hermione replied. "If there is it's extremely large. The H-Field as far as I can determine is enormous, and seems to be everywhere. Or everywhere I've been since I discovered it, certainly. None of the experiments I've carried out have caused more than a barely perceptible and very brief alteration in the field density as far as I can see. None of these HOPs are creating energy from nothing, they're not perpetual energy machines, they're energy converters. The experiments that led to the display and keyboard began as ones in producing what can be termed a force field. Once I'd managed that, I worked out that I could make it interact with electromagnetic energy, and that led to producing electromagnetic energy as well as being controlled by it. The pixels of the monitor are very small force fields, essentially, ones that only produce light of a specific wavelength."
"Force fields?" Doctor Langham said in a funny voice. She looked at him, then Doctor Younan.
"Yes. It's in my book. Although I didn't put it quite like that since I was trying to avoid science fiction terms."
She looked around and saw everyone was staring at her, except her parents, who seemed to be trying not to laugh. "Oh dear. Have I done it again?" she mumbled. "Whoops."
"I think you'd better show them, Hermione," her mother said with an amused sound to her voice.
"All right," she replied, thinking for a moment, then deciding that Mr Boots's cat bed would be as good a demonstration as anything. She quickly recreated it, the softly glowing platform barely visible in the brightly lit room, hanging just to one side.
No one said a word, they just fixated on the manifestation.
"This is something I made for Mr Boots," she explained, pointing at it. "He's a cat," she added when they kept staring. "He comes in all wet and walks all over my desk when I'm trying to work so I made him something to dry off on."
Looking like he was almost sleepwalking, Doctor Langham came out from behind the podium, which he'd been leaning on, walked over, and put his hand out. He very gently pushed on the platform. It didn't move, and he pushed harder. "It's a force field," he said in a weirdly calm voice.
"Yes, I know, I said that a moment ago," she replied, mildly confused. "Like the keyboard is."
Doctor Younan laughed. "You know, I realized that, and for some reason didn't think much about it, after the initial shock?" he remarked, shaking his head. "The implications didn't sink in until now. Good lord. What else can you do with HOPs?"
Doctor Langham was still poking the force field cat bed in a rather dreamy way. Looking at him for a moment, and deciding to leave him to it, she turned to the electronics engineer. "Well, before I made the display, I made a torch," she replied. "It was while I was experimenting to see if I could make a HOP that emitted light." Floating her backpack over from where it had been under her chair, she opened it and rummaged around inside for a moment, then produced one of her torches and handed it to him. "I can improve it, as I've worked out a better way to do it, but it works quite nicely."
He flicked the switch and looked startled at how bright it was. Aiming it at the ceiling he nodded, impressed. "This has a battery in it based on the weight."
"Only a single triple A cell for the switch," she agreed. "I can get around that now, but at the time it seemed the easiest way."
"Tell him about the heater," her father suggested, smiling.
She did.
"You're heating your house with the H-Field," he stated flatly.
"And powering it," she smiled. "I made a thing to make electricity two weeks ago." Reaching into her backpack she removed her first power source and handed it to him. "Like this, only a bit larger and easier to mount on the wall."
The engineer looked at the cubical device he was holding, then up at her smile, then at the audience, who were all completely silent and still. Eventually he very gently handed her both the cube and the torch, before leaning back and putting his hand over his eyes. "Oh, lord."
A few seconds later the first of what turned out to be a really quite remarkably large number of questions from the others present came, and she did her best to answer as completely as she could. On the whole, she thought, things were going rather well.
And she wondered when she should mention that she was fairly sure that she could teach anyone else who wanted to volunteer how to access the H-Field. It wasn't the sort of thing you could just drop into casual conversation, though, and for some reason the subject hadn't come up yet, but she was sure it would sooner or later.
Jerry watched through the window between one of the test labs and the observation area as Hermione Granger sat in the middle of a cloud of at least a dozen orbiting pencils while another one wrote on a pad of paper what the researcher on the other side of the table was dictating to her. Her eyes were shut and she was smiling a little, looking calm and relaxed. He finally tore his eyes away and turned to Farouk, who was standing next to him leafing through another copy of Hermione's thesis with his eyebrows so far up they almost disappeared.
"This is much bigger than I expected to the point that I'm not sure I can believe it even now," he said with a slight tremor in his voice. "This 'energy sense' of hers is so far past what I thought of ESP as being, if I even considered it, that it's hilarious. She can casually tell me how many people are in the building and where they are, for god's sake. Just like that. Forget reading a shape off a card, this is absolutely ridiculous."
"You're telling me?" Farouk replied, still staring at one page of the book in his hand. "I completely missed that she can make an actual, literal, force field. How did I do that? How else did she get the tactile feedback on the keyboard? Of course it was a force field. What else could you call it? But I just didn't think it through all the way. She even explains it in this, but she does it using maths and symbolic logic." He shook his head in a sort of a daze. "What other implications am I missing?"
"I dread to think," Jerry sighed. "I'm not sure how much more of this I can handle right now. It's going so far beyond what I was thinking it was I have no idea where it'll end."
"Somewhere extremely odd, I think," his friend responded. He closed the book and put it reverently on the table to one side. "But I can guarantee you the Vice Chancellor isn't going to be upset with you."
"I don't suppose he will be," Jerry nodded, smiling to himself. "I'll tell you one thing, though. That girl absolutely deserves a higher degree. As soon as I can arrange it."
"She's going to be a full professor by the time she's twelve at this rate," Farouk agreed with a chuckle.
"That wouldn't actually surprise me, to be honest." Watching the girl perform the tests on the other side of the glass, Jerry couldn't help feeling that perhaps they were in over their heads. The implications of all this were more and more incredible the longer you thought about it. And, in a very real sense, completely terrifying. However, even with that in mind, he was more excited now than he'd ever been before in his life and only seeming calm because his emotions had practically burned out from shock.
"There are so many commercial applications of just the things she's told us about so far that I wouldn't even know where to begin to categorize them," Farouk remarked as he also watched. "She's basically just solved the energy problem in one step, possibly without even fully realizing the implications of what she did. The effect that will have on the fossil fuel industry, and the nuclear one, and the electricity and gas distribution one…" He shook his head slowly as Jerry glanced at him for a moment. "I hate to think how chaotic things might get as a result. It'll have knock on effects on foreign policy, the middle east, global warming, pollution, food production… I can't even think of all the other areas it'll directly or indirectly impact. All of them, I suspect. And that's just from one invention she casually came up with for fun."
He turned a rather bewildered gaze to Jerry. "What else is she going to come up with out of the blue just because it seemed like a good idea?"
Jerry shrugged helplessly. "I can't answer that."
The pair of them were silent for a while. Eventually, Jerry asked, "Does that power cube actually work as she said?"
"Seems to," his friend nodded. "I ran a few tests on it and it produces a perfect two forty volt sine wave. Exactly on frequency too. We loaded it up to about ten kilowatts, which was all we could do with the equipment we had on hand, and the voltage didn't waver at all. I've got a couple of students fetching the relevant gubbins from the electrical engineering department to let us put a much larger load on it, but I suspect it will do exactly what she claims it does. We could probably power the whole building from it without any trouble."
"Christ. I see what you meant."
"Quite. It's a total game changer. The number of places where something like a six inch cube with megawatts of output would totally transform the entire situation is unbelievable. Put one into a train, and you can run the whole thing without any pollution or fuel, you don't need cables, or powered rails, or anything. The royal navy would go insane to lay hands on something like that to power their ships and subs. Electric aircraft? Cars? Buses? Transportation alone would be utterly revolutionized by that damn thing." His voice was somewhat faint. "The computer equipment was incredible. This is far beyond that."
After a moment, Jerry commented, "Probably a good thing Thatcher killed the coal mining industry already, I suppose."
Farouk snorted with dark amusement. "That's not quite the point I'm making, but it's certainly a point." He turned his head to regard Jerry. "You realize that sooner or later we're bound to have someone from the government take an interest in this?"
"That did cross my mind, yes," Jerry replied with a small frown. "Which could be difficult. I have no interest in having all this go under a D notice or something of that nature."
"I don't think they'd be able to pull that off, not really," his friend replied slowly. "Or rather, I think they could try, but I rather doubt Hermione would be very pleased about it. And it would be exceptionally hard to force that young woman to do anything she didn't want to do."
Jerry glanced at him, then looked back to where Hermione was now making the pencils float in a sort of three dimensional star with their points exactly touching, the whole thing rotating in three planes at once, while she was still writing with the last one. And smiling. "I suppose not," he agreed quietly. "Supersonic pencils would be somewhat… effective."
"She's a very calm child and I think very unlikely to do anything dangerous, at least on purpose," Farouk responded, shaking his head a little. "In fact she's more aware of safety than most of my own students are. But… push anyone far enough and they're going to push back. She has a lot more methods to push back than most people do. So do her parents. And I would really not like to see what would happen if she was forced to get inventive…"
They fell silent again, thinking disquieting thoughts, and watching the test series conclude. When the pencils neatly laid themselves in a row on the desk and the researcher thanked Hermione, who smiled at him then hopped to her feet and followed him out of the room, Jerry finally broke the quiet. "I think," he said thoughtfully, "that as and when we do get some official attention, we need to be very sure to point out quite strongly that this is not a situation where being heavy handed is likely to be a good idea. Just in case."
"I couldn't agree more," his friend replied, nodding. "Although a small part of me does rather want to see what might happen…"
Jerry gave him a hard look.
"A very small part of me," Farouk added with a grin.
Shaking his head, but inwardly somewhat amused, Jerry left the observation room and headed for the next place he needed to check, feeling that even with the worry that was lurking at the back of his mind which told him that just possibly he'd ended up with too much of a good thing, on the whole this was all working out better than he'd had any right to expect. Minor heart attacks and a distinct feeling that reality was quite a lot stranger than he'd realized aside.
He also made a mental note to start drawing up responses to possible government questions, as he was fairly sure they would be useful sooner or later. Annoyingly, since that sort of thing always got in the way, and he had never expected to be in a position to run into it. But then, none of this was really what he'd expected, so it was par for the course in a sense.
The life of a parapsychologist was apparently fraught with problems, he mused as he walked across his shiny new department. On the whole, though, he was fine with that as long as it got him the chance to be at the forefront of all the new knowledge that was turning up...