Farouk gaped open-mouthed at the scene on the other side of the observation window into the isolated experimental area. The Granger family were sitting around a table talking to one of the other parapsychological researchers, Doctor Jennifer Martine, a mid-thirties blonde who seemed to be having quite severe problems believing her eyes.
That did not in any way surprise him, since he was having the same trouble for the same reason.
Two pens were gently spinning in mid air above the center of the table, totally unsupported by anything at all. He could see it perfectly but he was still half convinced he was dreaming. "Bloody hell," he whispered.
"You see?!" Jerry spouted in glee, waving both hands at the window with the air of someone who was finally, after many years in the isolated desert of irreproducible results and crazy people thinking they were descended from Martians had stumbled across an oasis filled with proof of his theories. His grin was so wide it was probably going to need medical intervention to sort out.
Again, this did not in any way surprise Farouk. His friend was finally vindicated, unless there was some utterly incredible hoax going on here. Which was of course one of the reasons he was present.
After a long, long time filled with staring, the engineer slowly turned to his friend and peer. "You are going to get all the funding you ever dreamed of," he said in a wondering voice. "All of it."
"I know," Jerry giggled. Literally giggled like he was drunk. Abruptly whirling to Farouk he grabbed the other man's shirt and pulled him close. "Tell me this is real. Tell me it's not a trick. Or a dream."
"It certainly looks real to me," Farouk replied hesitantly with another glance at the bizarre scene on the other side of the window. "I can't see any method to do what is happening there that wouldn't need a lot of set up time, let's put it like that."
His friend tightened his grip and shook the other man. "Do you know what this means? Do you?"
"Ahh… no?" Farouk replied a touch nervously as his friend seemed on the verge of losing it. "What does it mean?" He could think of a lot of things but Jerry seemed to have some specific idea in mind.
Pulling the slightly taller man down to almost nose-touching distance, Jerry hissed, "I… Don't… Know."
He suddenly let got and spun around to put his hands on the window, while Farouk recoiled a little. "I don't know. But it's going to be a lot of fun finding out," he finished gleefully, smiling in a manner reminiscent of a contented ax murderer.
"All righty then," Farouk managed a moment or two later, having caught his breath. "Perhaps you should sit down?"
"No time for that! We need to seize the moment!" Raising his arm dramatically Jerry pointed at the Grangers. "To work! We will eliminate all the variables, categorize the phenomena, and theorize. We'll need full medical workups, an MRI scan, psychological profiles, background information, personality tests…" He was pacing around the room as if he'd overdosed on stimulants, talking rapidly, while Farouk just tried to keep out of his way and wondered whether his colleague was going to have some sort of episode. "We'll have to get them in the shielded room, set up all the EM monitoring equipment, thermal cameras, ultrasonic detectors, everything we have. You get that sorted out. I'll call Doctor Young, he can arrange the medical examinations, we'll need Will for some biological analysis… Oh, we'll need blood samples, a DNA workup, and an EEG, and…" He paused and stared at the family and their floating pens, then shook his head and turned on his heel for another lap of the room.
"This is big. Really big. Huge, even. Enormous!"
He wasn't wrong there, Farouk thought. The implications were incredible. But the other man wasn't stopping his verbal stream of consciousness. "Ganzfeld protocol needed?" He glanced at the pen orbiting Michael Granger's head and laughed like a madman. "No, gone way past that. But… remote viewing, or just TK?" He paused in his tracks and thought for a moment, then shrugged. "Do it right, throw everything at it. Incontrovertible, repeatable, documentable proof. That's the ticket. Video, photos, audio recordings, biological parameters, everything."
He stopped dead and fixed his friend with an intense look. "And get Christine over here."
"Why?" Farouk asked.
Jerry grinned like a madman. "Because I want her to see that," he replied in the most self-satisfied tone Farouk had ever heard in his life, pointing at the window. "Ghostbusters? I'll give her ghostbusters..."
Snickering manically he vanished out the door. A moment later his voice drifted back, making Farouk, who was alternately looking at the doorway where he'd been and the window where impossible things were still happening, to twitch. "Come on! We've got work to do! Stop lollygagging and help me!"
Sighing a little but feeling an undeniable excitement and a sort of lightheaded disbelief at life in general right now, Farouk went after the other man, with a last wondering glance over his shoulder at the floating pens.
"We're going to need a lot more than one day for this, you realize," Peter Young commented as he looked over his notes, checking the various blood sample tubes in a couple of plastic racks off against the list. He was in the main parapsychology lab, which was a rather grand way of referring to a medium-sized windowless room that looked like a conference area with extra equipment and some workbenches more than anything else. Behind him, Jerry and Will Ipsley were listening next to the big whiteboard on the other side of the room, while Farouk was working on one of the experimental data logging devices he'd come up with. Christine Blakely, who had nothing to do with this sort of work but had turned up a while ago, stared in silence for some time, then had to sit down, was leaning her head back to look at the ceiling tiles and apparently counting the holes while wearing a totally bewildered expression. Which was, to be honest, fair enough.
Peter looked over his shoulder at the pair scribbling copious notes and diagrams in half a dozen colors, occasionally erasing each other's work and replacing it with something else. Jerry slapped Will's hand away as he moved to do exactly that to a section of green text, while holding a red pen handy. "No. I'm right, leave it alone," he snapped in a low voice, before turning to meet the medical researcher's eyes.
When he wasn't looking Will stealthily corrected the text in red marker, looked satisfied, and went on to write some more text lower down.
"I know, believe me I know, Peter," he replied, shrugging helplessly. "This is so far beyond anything I ever in my life expected to run across I still can't believe it. I can see it being something an entirely new department could end up studying for decades. But we can't really ask the Grangers to sit there as experimental subjects for the rest of their lives, can we? We'll have to gather all the data we can now, then arrange to have them come back a little later and stay for longer. A week or so, perhaps, if they're willing."
"I would think they probably would be," Will remarked, still writing notes, then stepping back and studying them, before shaking his head and crossing a few things out. "After all, they contacted you."
"Yes, a good point," Jerry nodded, staring at the large monitor on one of the benches that was showing a view of the experimental area a few doors away where Helen Granger was running through some tests with Jennifer and one of the postgrads. The door opened to admit Doctor Alan Ellison, the psychologist that had been brought in from downstairs to supervise a whole battery of tests from his own specialty, who quietly entered and sat next to Christine, dropping a thick orange folder on the table. "On the other hand, the two parents have a busy dental practice they're hardly likely to want to just close without warning, and their daughter is only ten."
"And the single most precociously brilliant little girl I've ever met," Alan put in, shaking his head. Everyone looked at him causing him to wave a hand. "Continue, I'll fill you in on my results when you're finished."
Jerry looked back to Peter. "I'm going to ask them if there's a time in the next two months we can have them back for a much more complex series of tests. If they can arrange cover for their work, or a holiday and close the place, or whatever else can be sorted out, we can get them here for a week or so. The budget will stand putting them up in a good hotel for that time, and if they agree we can really get stuck in."
Farouk, who was up to his wrists inside a piece of electronics, snorted. "The budget is going to be utterly irrelevant once we present our findings to the Registrar," he chuckled. "Believe me, this is the single most important discovery anyone's made since the transistor. I'm telling you, we won't have money problems."
"He's got a good point," Will said, glancing around with a nod, then going back to pondering the whiteboard.
"That's as may be, but right now we haven't got that far so I'm not going to bank on something that hasn't happened yet," Jerry replied after a moment's thought. "We'll do what we can with what we've got, get every scrap of data we can work out how to gather, assemble all the evidence into a completely accurate and unassailable report, then move forward. It's going to take at least three weeks to write everything up, arrange all the other test facilities we'll need since a lot of them have long queues, work out the right people to bring in…" He trailed off with a slight shake of his head and a sigh.
"I've got the opportunity of a lifetime here and I do not want to make any mistakes," he added after the room was silent for a few seconds.
Christine lowered her head from her introspective study of the ceiling for the first time in a good ten minutes. Her eyes showed she was still having trouble with the whole thing, as were more or less all of them, but Peter knew her well enough to know she wasn't going to deny the data. "You realize that you're going to need a lot more than just medical, psychological, and biological experts, I hope?" she queried quietly.
They all looked her, then each other. She raised a hand and pointed at the monitors. "That utterly upends physics itself," she went on somewhat sharply. "I don't know about the parapsychology aspect, I'll leave that to Venkman over there, but they can make small objects float with their bloody minds! That's flatly impossible according to everything I know about physics. There's no magnetic field, no apparent warping of gravity, which would itself be a total revolution, no thermal effects, no air movement, nothing. The pens just float there. Forget your stupid random number generators and statistical anomalies, this is a macroscopic, repeatable effect orders of magnitude higher energy than making an electron shuffle around by thinking at it."
She threw her hands in the air with an expression of someone to whom the entire world has stopped making sense. "We need physicists. Astrophysicists, theoretical experts, math people, you name it. Steven Bloody Hawking if we can get him. This is like opening the fridge to get the butter and finding a black hole staring at you."
Farouk, who had stopped working on his device to listen, nodded. "She's right, you know," he said. "There's only so much all this will tell us, aside from anything else." He motioned to the equipment around him. "We need a hell of a lot more gear, access to a whole lab full of cutting edge sensory hardware, all that sort of thing. You've got some good people here, Jerry, but this is a lot more complicated than you can really handle without the right expert knowledge."
Appearing somewhat tired, Jerry nodded. "I realize that. I realized it about ten seconds after I saw a pen fly," he replied. "But we still need to do everything we can now while we have them here. All that comes later."
"Agreed," Peter said. He put the blood sample tube he'd been holding without really looking at it into the last slot in the rack. "I've got everything I need to run some genetic workups, and everything else I can think of."
"Chances you'll find something odd in the process?" Will asked, finally turning around from the whiteboard.
Peter shrugged. "Not a clue right now. I can tell you that every test I can run without delving into the blood work just shows them to be healthy and entirely unremarkable individuals. They clearly look after themselves, eat the right foods, brush after every meal…" He smiled a little as Jerry chuckled. "Not surprising considering their professions, that part. But nothing at all stands out as extraordinary." With a glance at the blood samples, he added, "Yet."
They all fell silent again for a little while. Finally Alan cleared his throat. "Right, then, the results of my preliminary tests, I suppose." He pulled the folder towards him and opened it. "Michael Granger, first. I ran the usual battery of assessments on him, and in brief he's a very intelligent, stable person who I would judge at the moment as being a healthy mix between introvert and extrovert, with a good sense of humor, low aggression levels, and nothing that stands out as concerning. A decent chap, in other words. Smarter than average, as you'd expect, but not a genius. An inquisitive mind, plenty of imagination, a significant amount of knowledge outside his specific field, a great interest in science fiction and other speculative literature while still having more than the usual interest in more practical areas." He turned the page he was looking at over, then scanned it, as well as the next one.
"I'd need a lot more time to do a full psychological workup on the man, but my initial findings are that he's probably above the eightieth percentile on most bell curves. Nothing stands out as concerning."
Turning a few pages, he went on, "Helen Granger is in many respects quite similar. Again, higher than average IQ, psychologically stable, somewhat more extroverted than her husband although not to the point it's a defining characteristic that stands out, although she was rather more reserved for the first few minutes… Not surprising of course. Less interested in science fiction and many of the sorts of thing her husband is, but not dismissive of them either, and probably more knowledgeable than most about them, I would assume because her husband is so invested in such things. Calm under pressure, as is he, which probably helps with dealing with stroppy patients and the like." He smiled a little.
"I'll write up all my findings properly and give you the usual sort of report later, but in brief they're nice people, smart, friendly, and undoubtedly very good parents. Close to each other and their daughter, and certainly not remotely the sort of person we've had trouble with in the past."
Jerry sighed, clearly remembering one or two of the members of the public who had been through the department over the years. Peter had met a few like that himself and didn't blame the man.
"And the daughter?" Will asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down, spinning the whiteboard pen through his fingers.
"Ah. That's where it gets interesting," Alan replied with a slightly worried look.
"Interesting good or interesting bad?" Jerry asked.
"Good, definitely, but very strange in some ways." Alan took a couple of dozen pages out of the folder and put them to one side, then leafed through the remainder, which was at least half the thickness. He looked up after a few seconds of quiet as they waited. "As I said, that girl is… unusual."
"High end of the bell curve?" Peter commented, getting a wry grin in response.
"She blows the bell curve out of the water," the other man replied, shaking his head. "Absolutely Mensa material. I administered the standard WISC-R test, which she immediately identified by name, having apparently read about it when she was eight. Completely off the charts on every single aspect. So I moved onto the WAIS-R test for adults. Verbal IQ, performance IQ, and full scale IQ are so high they're essentially meaningless, for what that's worth. Definitely genius level."
"How high did she score?" Peter asked curiously.
Alan shrugged. "When you go above about one forty, one fifty or so, you get into the point of diminishing returns where for most purposes it doesn't matter," he replied. "There's no one number that encapsulates everything about the mind, after all."
"How high?" he persisted, just to satisfy himself.
The psychologist sighed. "Somewhere above one eighty, but as I said it's almost impossible to properly measure that sort of thing at such a level. Too many contributing factors."
Will whistled softly under his breath.
"She's smarter than anyone here," he commented with small laugh.
"Oh, certainly," Alan agreed. "As I said, she's absolutely prime Mensa material. But unlike many of the truly brilliant people I've met, she's unusually well adjusted. Introverted, definitely, but not to an unhealthy level. No apparent behavioral issues a preliminary workup can identify, aside from a certain amount of shyness, which her parents said she exhibited with many new people on first meeting them. Ridiculously large vocabulary, especially for someone so young. Her general knowledge is very good, although not exceptional other than in areas she's become interested in, but then she is only ten so that's not unexpected. In the areas she is concentrating on she knows an enormous amount. By the looks of it, when she decides she wants to know about something, she just reads everything she can find on it and remembers the lot."
"Eidetic memory?" Christine asked with interest.
He rocked a hand from side to side. "Without more tests I can't be totally certain, but for all intents and purposes probably yes. The reading comprehension tests were fascinating; essentially perfect recall, a reading speed of well over two thousand words a minute, and a comprehension level that's at least university student grade if not higher." He smiled for a moment as they exchanged glances. "Apparently she memorized the London Underground map and most of the central London A-Z because it was more efficient than referring to a book. When she was about nine. Sure, a black cab driver can do the same thing, but it takes them years normally. She did it in about a week for fun."
"Her brain's going to be full before she's old enough to drink at that rate," Farouk laughed.
Alan looked amused, then turned back to his notes. "In any case, she's someone who is certainly well out of the standard distribution on any scale you care to name," he went on. "One in a million at least. She'll have a degree by the time she's sixteen if my guess is right. Her maths skills are very high, she has a spatial reasoning ability that's incredible…"
He shook his head. "The only thing I could identify as a potentially problematic attribute is that she's socially isolated from her age group to a significant level. I would put that down to the fact that she's mentally so far ahead of almost any child her own age she finds it hard to connect. Emotionally she's far more mature than I expected. That said, while she has a very good relationship with her family, if she was a patient of mine I'd be looking for ways to have her find a peer group. She obviously gets along better with adults than her age cohort, and I think there's probably a certain amount of bullying at school. Her aggression index is low, so I expect she simply withdrew even more as a result of that, which would be quite concerning if she didn't have family support."
"She's lonely," Christine remarked. He glanced at her and nodded a little.
"In some senses, yes, I think so. On the other hand she's remarkably well adjusted even so, and while she probably needs a few friends, there's nothing I can point at as something I'd be immediately worried about. She'll most likely meet people she can get along with as her schooling progresses. At her age, children tend to be very observant about differences, and don't yet have the emotional or intellectual understanding to accept differences."
"Children are little shits to each other, in other words," Farouk said.
Alan nodded with a mild frown. "Essentially." He put all the documents away, closed the folder, and leaned back. "All that adds up to them being fairly normal in most respects, without anything outstanding in the way of psychological issues that can be detected without further study. Michael and Helen are good parents, well adjusted, sane, and sensible people, with a truly gifted daughter who is also a perfectly normal little girl if you forget about the fact she could probably give Hawking a run for his money. And, of course, if you ignore that." He waved at the monitor.
"Which is rather the problem."
Everyone turned to regard the screens, then as one looked at Jerry. "So? What do you want to do next?" Farouk asked. "We've been at this half the day so far and we've got enough data to write at least a dozen papers already. But we're no closer to knowing what's happening, how it's happening, or what the limitations are."
His friend looked momentarily overwhelmed, but rallied. "I think we all need to take a break and get something to eat, talk to the Grangers and see if they're willing and able to come back for a longer session once we can get all the resources we need in place, then do the rest of the tests we've set up this afternoon. We still have MRIs scheduled at four, I want to do some more TK tests, and Michael remarked that Hermione had some of her own notes that she thought I might find useful." He looked around, everyone seeming agreeable.
"Sounds like a decent plan to me," Will put in. "Shall we get some food delivered, or…?"
"Let's ask the Grangers what they'd like. No sense feeding them pizza from that place you seem to like," Peter commented, smiling. "We want them to want to come back."
Will appeared mildly insulted while the rest of them laughed.
"I've been going to Luigi's since I was a student here," he complained.
"You need more variety. Come on, let's pause things for a while. We'll think better with some food in us." Jerry headed for the door. "I'll be back in a bit."
Feeling pleasantly full from the restaurant Doctor Langham had taken them too, along with the entirety of the research team which by now was thirteen people, Hermione looked around as the minibus the taxi company had provided shuttled them back to the parapsychology lab. She'd found the entire process quite fascinating so far, and it was very amusing to watch the faces of everyone who was watching while feeling their shock. And excitement, as every single one of them after that initial open mouthed staring phase had become very invested in working out what was going on.
Doctor Langham himself seemed very nice and very smart, as well as very, very happy. She got the distinct impression he'd been waiting for someone like them for his entire life. Hermione hoped he and his team might be able to cast some light on what the H-field actually was, something she was still wondering about herself. She could use it but so far didn't really understand it to the level she wanted, which was completely.
No point doing things half way after all.
When they got back she was going to show him her book. So far they hadn't done more than minor parlor tricks, not wanting to overwhelm the poor scientists, and that had already apparently got them more excited than anything. She was wondering a little worriedly if he'd get so worked up he had to have a lie down when he learned more, which had seemed distinctly possible when her father had played his little joke on the poor man.
After some thought she'd decided that for now she wouldn't reveal quite how much more powerful her own abilities were, as it seemed like too much, too soon, if they were that shocked by merely floating a pen around the room. Lifting the entire building off its foundation was probably going too far although she was certain she could do it if she really wanted to try.
The girl spent a few minutes designing a properly heavy lift telekinetic amplifier just for fun, thinking it might be useful at some point, then went back to watching the street slowly pass outside the window as the queue of traffic they'd got stuck in due to roadworks of some kind up ahead very reluctantly moved. Probing ahead with her energy sense she scanned the area, idly looking for anything interesting, especially one of the hidden people's pseudoHOPs. So far she still hadn't detected even a whiff of that mysterious group or their works anywhere in the area and she'd been carefully looking whenever she could spare a moment.
Once again, she was struck by a tiny feeling that something was… odd… about the H-field around here compared to back at home, or in London for that matter. It was infuriatingly difficult to pin down although she'd been trying all day. Was it the background energy level? No, that seemed as best she could tell to be at the same level she'd sensed everywhere so far. Nothing seemed to be drawing on it, there were no noticeable knots of energy that might show someone had been playing around with it, all the usual distortions from the scenery and living things were there and apparently normal, yet...
It was really becoming tiresome trying to work out what the difference was.
Eventually Hermione sighed under her breath, put the question aside for the moment again, and looked around. She was right at the back of the bus, with her parents sharing the bench seat there, Doctor Langham and his colleague Doctor Younan, the electronics engineer, were directly in front of her, and the rest of the team filled all the other seats. Most of them were chatting about the project, being discreet about it so the driver didn't work out what they were discussing, but then their talk was so technical she was having trouble with most of it herself.
After a moment, she opened her bag and took out a notebook and pen, then flipped the former open while clicking the top of the latter. Bending over the paper she made notes on what had happened so far, what they'd said was going to happen when they got back, and her own impressions of what their study was finding and how. Satisfied she'd got her documentation sorted, she flipped the page and sketched out her heavy lift amplifier in the notation she'd invented for it, based heavily on electronic schematics, making a few corrections after studying the end result for a while, then went back a few pages and started doing some more work on her SEP design, which she could see a number of ways to improve. She was also designing a method to detect one of her own SEPs, and that led her to ways to hide them from that detection method, which in turn led to other hiding techniques… It was one of those recursive problems that could go very strange if you kept at it long enough.
She was almost taken by surprise when they arrived back at the university, having been so deeply involved in her work she'd lost track of the outside world although her energy sense was absently monitoring everything by reflex. That had rather become habit by now.
"Finally," Doctor Langham said in a mildly exasperated voice as he stood almost before the bus stopped. Moving forward to pay the driver, he was quickly outside, everyone else getting up and filing after him. Hermione smiled at the driver and waved, getting a wave back, then joined her parents.
"I'm sorry about the delay, traffic can be a proper pain in the arse in the middle of the city," the parapsychologist apologized as they walked towards the entrance.
"It was only a minor hold up and not a bother, Jerry," her mother assured him. "Traffic is always a nuisance. The restaurant was lovely, though."
"I've always liked that place, I have to admit," he smiled, glancing at her. "Oxford has some exceptional restaurants, but many of them are also rather expensive. Too expensive for a lowly professor's salary, unfortunately. That one is surprisingly affordable when you consider how good it is." He pulled the door open for them, and stood to one side as they entered, following afterwards with Doctor Younan and the others coming in behind him. Soon they were back in the parapsychology department, sitting in his office again while everyone else went about their various tasks, except for Doctors Young and Ipsley, who had come in with them.
"So what's the next step?" her father queried.
Doctor Langham steepled his fingers and contemplated them for a few seconds, deep in thought. "Today, we have the MRI scans to do, both to establish a baseline scan without you doing the TK, and another one with you exerting yourself," he finally said, reaching out to pick up a thick notebook full of scribbled documentation that he'd been adding to constantly the entire time. "Comparing them, both against each other and to each of you may give us some insight into what the actual mechanism behind these abilities are." He looked at the top page of his notes, then put the book down again with a slight sigh. "I have to confess I'm not completely sure we'll see anything, but it's certainly worth a try."
"That all three of you can perform this sort of thing suggests a genetic link," Doctor Ipsley put in as they looked over at him. "Possibly a recessive gene that both parents carry…" He thought for a moment, then shook his head. "No, if that was the case it would only express itself in Hermione, in all probability. Some environmental activation perhaps?" His expression showed he was deep in thought and he fell silent again. After a moment everyone looked at each other, then back to Doctor Langham who was watching his colleague in a slightly bemused way.
Eventually he shrugged and turned back to them. "That's certainly one thing we will be checking for. Along with every other possible reason that anyone can think of." He shook his head slightly. "Of course, we're suddenly confronted with a reality that's totally altered everything we thought we knew or suspected about parapsychological phenomena, which has rather confused the issue. It could take quite a while to even begin to properly understand what's behind it all."
"That's why we came to you, Jerry," her father smiled. "It had gone past the point that any knowledge we had could explain it, although Hermione has put in a substantial amount of her own work on the subject for nearly two years now."
"So you mentioned, yes," Doctor Langham nodded, looking towards Hermione who smiled at him. "Have you made much progress, Hermione?"
"I like to think I've learned quite a lot, yes, Doctor," she replied happily. "It's still a work in progress, of course. I'm gathering a lot of experimental data which appears to be internally consistent even though most of it is hard to reconcile with current theories of physics and biology." He was smiling a little oddly at her, she noticed, and both the other scientists were watching with much the same smile. "I've attempted to be as rigorous as possible in my experimental protocols and methodology, although there have been some minor setbacks at times." The pencil still haunted her. "But while I have quite a body of work on practical implementation of aspects of my theories, a full understanding of the underlying causal mechanism behind telekinesis is still a work in progress."
His odd look was still there and if anything had strengthened, which was mildly amusing. The poor man had spent quite a lot of the time with that sort of expression.
After a few seconds, he cleared his throat. "I see," he replied. "Please don't take this the wrong way, but you are quite an unusual young woman."
Hermione giggled. "Mommy and Daddy have said the same thing sometimes," she said, causing her father to grin and her mother to put her hand on her shoulder for a second. "I can't help it. I like learning things."
"A laudable outlook on life," Doctor Young commented, chuckling. "I expect you'll do well in whatever you end up choosing as your career."
"Oh, I've already chosen that, Doctor," she assured him. "Electronics engineering and Psionics research." She smiled brilliantly. "They're remarkably compatible. I think I also need to learn a lot more about computer programming, although I'm doing quite well so far. I may also write books."
"I… see," Doctor Langham said again, sounding somewhat baffled. "Psionics?"
"That's what I've called this whole field, since it seemed to fit," she explained. "Daddy reads a lot of science fiction and the concept is a common one. I've read most of his books too, and decided that while they were fiction, they were also full of surprisingly good ideas that matched up well with what I was discovering. So I've been using some of the more plausible concepts in my own research. It needed a proper name, after all. You can't have an entire field of study that's not got its own name. Make-pens-fly-thinky-stuff is hardly scientific." Hermione grinned at him, and after a moment or two he started laughing.
"You have a point, certainly," he chuckled, wiping his eyes, when he ran down. "Psionics. I can see why you'd pick that."
"Now that you've done a lot of your own tests and are satisfied we're telling the truth, would you like to see my own research?" she offered. He looked at his colleagues, then back to her.
"I'm curious to see what you've managed," he replied, nodding. "Possibly you've noticed something we've missed."
"All right. I brought you a copy." She opened her bag and pulled out her book, handing it over to him as his eyes widened somewhat. "I'm still gathering data for volume two, of course, and I will probably have to revise this one at some point in a second edition, but it's current up to about a month ago."
"Principles of H-Field manipulation via Psionic Methods," he read slowly out loud, "Original research methodology, results, and conclusions, by Hermione J Granger."
"I have been fully documenting my work from the beginning," she said excitedly as he opened the cover and looked at the first page. "I may have made some mistakes in the proper scientific procedural methods in the initial phase, but I got some books from the library on the correct process and have done my best to adhere rigorously to it. I repeated the initial experiments to make sure I had valid data on them. Once I'd filled quite a lot of notebooks I realized I collected enough data to write an entire book on it, and my parents suggested that was a good idea. If nothing else than to force me to collate it all and make sure that everything was fully consistent. Mommy and Daddy helped with the editing, which was brilliant as they've got a lot more practice at that sort of thing than I do, but I think it came out quite well for a first attempt."
Hermione smiled at him as he looked up, then back at the book. "Mr Boots helped too, of course, but that was mostly as a combined experimental subject for some of the experiments and as a sounding board for my ideas." She thought briefly, then added, "I asked him for consent and he could have withdrawn from the experimentation at any point if he wanted. I wouldn't do anything unethical to him, after all. But he seemed to enjoy it."
"Mr Boots?" Doctor Young asked in a somewhat confused voice.
"The neighbor's cat," her father explained with a small grin. "He likes Hermione and spends more time at our house than his own."
"Ah." The medical researcher nodded his understanding, a similar grin coming and going.
Doctor Langham was reading the first chapter with his eyebrows a long way up his forehead. "The H-field?" he asked after reaching the bottom of the page.
She waved a hand. "It's what makes telekinesis happen although I still don't know what it is," she replied, frowning. "Psionic abilities manipulate it in various ways. What the link between the mind and the field is I haven't managed to pin down yet although I'm working on it." With a slightly embarrassed laugh she added, "I called it the H-field because… well, I discovered it, I think, at least I couldn't find any published research on the subject although I'll admit I don't have the same resources you do, and I had to call it something. I agree it's a little presumptuous to name it after myself but we can always change it."
As he was about to ask something else, there was a tap on the door, then it opened to reveal Doctor Martine, the scientist who'd been running the original tests on what they could do. "Jerry, the MRI tech called and said they're ready any time you are."
Doctor Langham looked at her, back at Hermione's book, closed it, then stood. "Excellent. Let's get our guests over there then, and see what comes of it." He followed as they all left the room, then ran back and reemerged holding the book, which he tucked under his arm.
After a fairly short walk to another building nearby, Hermione's family and another half dozen researchers went into a room containing a lot of high tech equipment that looked straight out of a science fiction film. She'd never seen an MRI scanner before, although she'd read about them and found the entire concept fascinating. Visible through an open door at the end of a short corridor was a large upright toroid with a sort of bed arrangement in front of it, set up so that someone lying on the bed would have the torus around their head. There were large signs everywhere warning about not approaching the room with anything metal on your person or dire problems would ensue. She recalled from one of the articles she'd read that the magnetic field of these machines was incredibly powerful and always running, so you really didn't want to take anything magnetic into the room. Or have bits of steel in you, because they wouldn't be very soon after going into the machine…
"Hello, Mark," Doctor Langham greeted the young man in a white coat who was waiting for them. Mark nodded to him, while looking at the crowd who had accompanied them with some confusion.
"What's going on, Doc?" he asked curiously. "How many people am I scanning?"
Doctor Langham chuckled. "Just these three, the rest are here to see what happens. We've got a rather important research project on and we're accumulating quite the collection of observers."
The radiologist nodded, seemingly accepting that. "All right. We've got a two and a half hour slot for you, which should be enough. Full cranial imaging, you said?"
"Yes, two series, one baseline and one active," Doctor Langham replied, motioning to Doctor Young who handed the younger man a clipboard. "All the paperwork's been filled in already. These are the Grangers, Michael, Helen, and Hermione."
"Hermione?" the man asked with a smile, looking at her. "That originates from Greek, doesn't it?"
"It does, yes," she replied.
"A nice name. Unusual but nice."
"Thank you." Hermione smiled back at him.
He looked through the paperwork and nodded. "It looks fine, Doctor. All right, who's first?"
"Michael, I think," Doctor Langham said, glancing at her father who nodded agreeably. "And Mark?"
The technician turned to him enquiringly. "You're going to see some things that are, for now, not to be mentioned to anyone. Medical ethics and privacy reasons."
"I do know how to keep my mouth shut, Doctor," Mark replied easily. "You wouldn't believe some of the things I've seen here."
"Nothing like this," Doctor Langham mumbled, but he seemed satisfied.
"If you'll follow me, Mr Granger? We need you to change into this gown in there, and make certain that there are no metal objects on your person. No watch, hearing aid, anything like that. You have no implants, no fragments of anything metallic in your body that you know of?" Mark asked as he led her father to a side room.
"No, nothing."
"Excellent. As soon as you're changed, go through the door at the end and I'll meet you inside," Mark replied. He watched as her father went into the room and closed the door, then turned to the rest of them. "You can watch in there," he went on, indicating an opening on the other side of the corridor. "Please don't touch anything though. This machine is a bit fiddly to set up, it's a research unit and somewhat of a prototype, so we have to baby it a little."
Hermione and the others went into what was obviously the control area for the machine that could be seen through a large window in front of them. On their side there were several computer monitors, some of the largest Hermione had ever seen, along with a lot of computers around the place as well as quite the collection of rack-mounted equipment against two walls. There were also half a dozen chairs besides the one in front of the operator's console.
She examined everything closely, curious about how it worked, but very carefully kept her hands well away from it all. She didn't know what it did and wasn't going to risk interfering with someone else's equipment without their permission. That was just common sense as well as being polite.
"The scanner here is, as Mark said, a research tool rather than an actual medical imaging device," Doctor Langham explained as he came to stand beside Hermione and her mother. "It's designed primarily for scanning the brain, not the entire body as some of the newer ones can do. And it's got some experimental cutting edge software available that's still being designed but in a few years is undoubtedly going to hugely improve the clinical effectiveness of these machines. If we want to do a larger scale MRI we'd have to go to John Radcliffe hospital a few miles away, and that will take some time to set up." He smiled a little at them. "Luckily this one sees much less use and is usually available on short notice for a research project, although we did get lucky no one was using it this afternoon."
Hermione watched as Mark, who had been working on the machine, turned around when her father entered the room wearing a hospital gown. She waved to him with a big grin, as he looked quite silly, and got a wry smile back. Then he followed the technician's instructions and lay down on the table, Mark carefully making sure he was in the right place with his head in a plastic brace that got gently adjusted. Finally satisfied, the man said something to her father who gave him a little wave of acknowledgment, before heading for another door next to the window and entering the control room.
"Right, we're all set up for the first sequence," he said as he sat down, then started pressing buttons. When he was ready he pulled a microphone that was suspended above the desk on a flexible mount into position and pressed the talk switch. "Can you hear me, Mr Granger?"
Her father's voice came through a speaker on the console. "Perfectly, yes."
"Good. I'm going to start the scan now. It will be quite loud, unfortunately, but those earplugs should help. Do your best not to move at all. I'll let you know when we're finished. It will take about twenty minutes."
"I understand. Fire away, Igor."
Mark snickered, while her mother sighed. He typed on a keyboard for a few seconds, hit a couple of control keys, and pressed one last button. The machine in the other room immediately started emitting a whole series of loud thumping sounds that even in here were clearly audible.
Everyone watched the screen on the right, where a ghostly monochrome image was slowly building up. Hermione was fascinated by the whole thing. Mark leaned close to it and inspected it carefully, appearing satisfied although he minutely tweaked a few controls, then sat back. "Getting decent contrast," he muttered to himself.
Doctor Young and Doctor Ipsley were standing as close as they could get to watch the screen, exchanging low comments every now and then, while Doctor Langham was observing from one of the chairs. He was still holding Hermione's book in his hand. Doctor Martine was sitting next to him going over a folder of paperwork with a pen, looking up occasionally then returning to her work. She'd lost the utterly bewildered expression she'd initially had by now and had become intent and focused.
Hermione and her mother watched the process for a few minutes, and the images steadily accumulated. The sound of the machine altered every now and then, but remained loud. Eventually they both went and sat down where they could see the goings-on without being in the way. "I hope I don't end up deaf from that thing," her mother commented quietly to Hermione, who giggled.
"It is terribly noisy, isn't it?" she replied. "I'm rather dreading it myself. But it will be worth it if they find something useful."
"Do you think they will?" her mother asked.
Hermione shrugged slightly. "I don't know enough about the brain to answer that, Mummy."
Her mother smiled at her, then put her arm over her shoulders. Both of them sat there for the next fifteen minutes waiting patiently. Hermione noticed that Doctor Langham was now reading her book very carefully, nodding to himself here and there, and occasionally going back a few pages. She hoped he wasn't picking too many holes in her work. That would be rather embarrassing after all. On the other hand, having an expert look at it was probably for the best.
After a while, Hermione closed her eyes and started using the energy sense to look around. The MRI machine was interesting, as there was definitely a very small but quite distinctive repetitive distortion surrounding it that appeared to be synchronized with the sound, the H-field in the immediate vicinity minutely altering with each thump. She finally came to the conclusion that it was probably the intense magnetic field very lightly interacting with the H-field, in a way that was similar to but distinct from how a living organism did the same. The effect was incredibly small and didn't carry far, no more than a couple of feet from the torus, but it was definitely there.
Having pondered that curiosity for a few minutes, she made a mental note to write her observations down, then started looking further afield. Passing over all the people she could sense, she expanded her range more and more until she was at the limit, covering what had to be a large part of the city. Nothing particularly stood out and there was still no indication of the hidden people and their devices. She once again frowned very slightly as she noticed that same effect that had been present all day, still not quite able to describe what it was that was different aside from it being there. Which was becoming quite the irritation if she was honest.
Following a lot of thinking and different ways to examine the H-field energy, she finally gave up again. All she'd managed to do was conclude that this strange variability seemed ever so slightly stronger in one direction than the opposite one, but it was such a small change she wasn't at all sure she wasn't imagining it. When they left she'd have to very carefully monitor the background field level and see if she could determine when the effect reduced or stopped, which might give her enough information to make a decent guess at the cause. It didn't seem to affect how the field worked, it was more akin to a slight change in the light level that was right at the threshold of perception than anything else she could think of.
Hearing the MRI machine stop, she opened her eyes and looked around. Doctor Langham put her book on the chair and got up, walking over to stand next to the biologist and medical researcher. "Does anything stand out?" he queried as Mark worked on the keyboard for a while, before turning a control which made the image on the monitor change in a very strange way. Hermione watched with interest, realizing that it was showing a sequence of slices through her father's head in shades of gray, which produced an intriguing and mildly disturbing effect. She could see his eyeballs…
"Looks like a perfectly healthy brain to me," Mark commented, glancing at Doctor Young, who was leaning over him to inspect the monitor. "What do you think, Doctor Young?"
"I'd concur with that. Nothing of any concern that leaps out at me," Doctor Young replied after a few seconds. He reached for the control, Mark leaning out of the way, and played with it for a while. "Cerebral density is normal, no signs of any lesions, arterial issues, voids… Blood flow appears correct… I'd say that was entirely normal and expected."
"All right. Let's reset, then do another sequence with… the special effects active." Doctor Langham looked at Mark, who seemed curious. "Brace yourself, this is the strange part."
Mark frowned slightly as Hermione and her mother giggled. Moving around the technician, Doctor Langham pressed the talk button. "Michael?"
"Ten four, good buddy," her father immediately replied. "I've got my ears on."
"Oh for…" Hermione's mother sighed, while Hermione grinned.
"Indeed," Doctor Langham said very dryly. "I'm sure that's good news. Can we do the thing now?"
"Of course." Her father lifted his right hand, opening it to show a plastic rod about six inches long that the doctor had given him before they'd come in. It lifted into the air and hung there.
"Jesus…" Mark snapped his mouth shut as he stared in shock. There was a long silence before he said in a somewhat stunned voice, "Well, that's new."
"As I said, this is the strange part," Doctor Langham replied, sounding like he was trying not to laugh.
"Finally got one, hmm, Doc?" the technician said, shaking his head and going back to the controls.
"I got three, actually," Doctor Langham grinned, causing the man to look at him, then over his shoulder. Hermione waved at him, smiling. He shook his head again and resumed work.
"We're going again, Michael. Keep still please."
"Hold on, I need to scratch my nose." Mark's hand hovered over the control as her father furiously scratched, then waved. "Done. You may proceed when ready."
"Thank you," Mark chuckled, releasing the talk button and pressing the start one in sequence.
Another nearly twenty minutes of thumping passed, with Hermione's father keeping the plastic rod floating in mid air, although he occasionally flew it around a little for amusement. All of the scientists were gathered around the monitor this time, watching intently for the slightest difference. Hermione watched as well, leaning on her mother.
When it finally finished they compared the results to the previous scan for some time. Eventually Doctor Young shook his head. "I can't see any differences I'd swear to, I have to admit," he said. "Possibly slight changes here, in the parietal lobe, but that could be an artifact of the scan process."
"We can run the datasets through some of the newer processing software later," Doctor Langham commented. "Gerald Hastings mentioned that there was a new experimental process derived from some work the Japanese have been carrying out for a while that could end up becoming a very powerful analysis tool for this sort of work." He looked at Mark. "We'll need the raw data tapes for that."
"Not a problem, Doctor, I can get them over to you tomorrow."
"Excellent. Well, in that case we must press on with our next subject." He turned and looked at Hermione and her mother. "Which one of you would like to experience forty minutes of boredom and loud noises next?"
Her mother stood up. "I suppose we should leave the best for last," she remarked with a smile, causing Hermione to laugh. He nodded. Mark had gone back into the scanner room to release her father from the machine, soon returning to guide Hermione's mother into the changing room. By the time she was lying down on the scanner table, Hermione's father was sitting next to her. He gave her a look.
"How are you holding up, dear?" he asked quietly. "This is going to be a very long day."
"It's fun, Daddy," she replied. "I don't mind, although I'll certainly sleep well tonight."
"We won't be home until very late, I'm afraid. But it's the holidays so you can sleep as long as you like tomorrow."
"I expect I won't feel much like getting up until the afternoon."
"Are you ready, Helen?" Mark said through the intercom.
"Yes, I'm all set," Hermione's mother replied calmly.
"Here we go. Hold still." The thumping started up once more. Hermione leaned back in the chair and settled in for the long haul, pulling her notebook out and turning to a fresh page. While this was interesting, as she's said, there was a limit to how long she could stare at a very slowly appearing black and white image even if it was the inside of her mother's head, especially if she could be doing some useful work in the mean time.
Farouk looked up as Jerry entered the shielded test room, slumping into a chair at the table and rubbing his face with his hands. "All done with the MRIs?" he asked, putting his soldering iron down on the stand.
"Yes. Nothing stood out, which I was rather expecting to be the case. We'll run the datasets through the big computer using that new software the imaging group is working on, on the off chance it will show something useful, but I'm not holding my breath." His friend leaned back in the chair and stretched. "Long day, and it's not over yet."
"A long day that will go down in history," Farouk said, shaking his head in wonder. "I'm still in shock."
"You think you're in shock?" Jerry half-grinned at him. "There are three people in the next room who finally vindicated my entire field of study in the most spectacular way I could possibly imagine. I'm still walking around wondering if this is a dream."
Farouk nodded, knowing what he meant. "It's not a dream, Jerry. If it is I'm having the same one, and so is everyone else." After a moment he grinned. "Mind you, you managed to absolutely break Christine so there's that if nothing else."
The other man laughed. "She does have a somewhat odd expression at the moment, doesn't she?"
Picking the iron up again, Farouk went back to work, altering the innards of one of the high sensitivity amplifiers used in the EM field detector they'd been using to try to find some evidence of how the Grangers were managing to fly small objects. So far without any success. "What are you going to do about her suggestions?"
"We'll present the Registrar with our results as soon as we get everything to a point where we can do that, and arrange to find some suitable people to help with the physics side of things. I'll get a preliminary report put together tomorrow, just to give them some warning." Jerry heaved a great sigh, although it was a contented one. "I expect there's going to be quite a few people coming by over the next few days, mostly to shout at me."
"You've got so much evidence and so many witnesses the entire thing is beyond doubt," Farouk told him. "They'll shout, but they'll have to admit you were right."
Jerry got a small evil grin and looked supremely satisfied for a few seconds. "I know," he said very quietly while rubbing his hands together, causing his friend to snicker.
"Did you look at the girl's notes?" Farouk asked as he put the iron down once more, then started screwing the shielding panels back in place.
There was no answer, so he looked up, to see the other man staring at a thick comb-bound document in front of him. He'd dropped it on the table when he'd come in. "What's that?" he asked.
Jerry deliberately picked it up and turned it so he could see the printing on the cover page. He read it with mild incredulity, then raised his eyes to meet those of his friend. "H-field?" he queried. "What on earth is that?"
"It makes telekinesis happen, according to Miss Granger," Jerry replied with a rather peculiar expression. "This is her notes. She literally wrote the book on what she has been doing for something like two and a half years now." He slid the thing over to Farouk, who put down the pozidrive screwdriver and picked it up. Opening the book he scanned the first page, then flicked slowly through it. "She's ten. I couldn't write a thesis that good when I was a postgrad."
"Her parents did it for her?" Farouk guessed.
His friend shook his head. "They edited it for her, and helped with a few minor details, but it's at least ninety five percent her own work. And one hundred percent original, groundbreaking, well designed and documented, academic research. On a field she's essentially invented from first principles."
"Good lord." Farouk stopped about half way through and read a few paragraphs. "H-Field Operator?"
"Described as an energy construct made from a deliberate distortion of the H-field that can be designed to perform a task, analogous to an electronic component at the simplest level, but can be arranged in complex networks." The other man shrugged. "In all honesty most of it is so far past my own knowledge I don't understand it, but she seems to be heavily drawing on electronic theory. Which she has a very good working knowledge of, by the looks of it, although you'd be able to assess that better than I can."
He stared at Farouk almost helplessly. "She's ten, Farouk. Ten years old."
"Alan did say she was a genius," Farouk replied as he turned the page. A lot of the description he was reading seemed very familiar, although the underlying principles were certainly extremely different to what he was used to. It was obvious that the girl did indeed have a very thorough understanding of quite a lot of electronic theory, probably easily up to undergraduate level. He was distinctly impressed and just a touch worried.
Jerry didn't say anything as he read the rest of the chapter, then scanned the next few quite fast. Eventually he put the book down and looked at his friend. "How much of this is actually right?" he asked.
The other man sighed while shrugging. "I genuinely don't know yet, but I have a sneaking suspicion that she's completely correct. Not finished, and the implications of what she can probably already do are deeply worrying in some ways, but what she has done is so carefully documented and so internally consistent that I expect we'll find out she's bang on the money."
"That leads to some very odd conclusions."
"Doesn't it just."
They stared at each other for a while. "Miss Granger said she had some proof in the car of much of her H-field theory if we wanted to see it," Jerry finally said. "Shall we?"
"I think we'll have to," Farouk replied. He looked at the book again, picking it up and weighing it in his hand. "Two hundred and forty two pages. You know that if she's right this probably is enough for a DSc? It certainly would be if she was older."
"It did cross my mind," the other man admitted, almost smiling. "I may have to look into that. If nothing else than to watch people's faces at someone that young with a higher doctorate."
"The Doctor Granger family would be complete," Farouk snorted. He handed the book back as he stood up. "Let's see what she's got."
"I almost dread to think what it will be," Jerry said as they left the lab and went to find the Grangers and the rest of their team.
Carefully putting her holographic display controller box down on the lab bench next to the BBC Master they'd brought in from the car, Hermione sat down and started connecting everything up. The entire team of scientists and postgraduate students watched her, mostly looking somewhat puzzled, while her parents sat down near her and seemed amused by the expressions. "Where's the monitor?" Sam Jenkins, one of the students, asked curiously.
She tapped the top of the aluminium box with her finger. "Here," she replied with a smile.
He examined it, then her, before looking at one of his colleagues with a confused appearance. She kept working until everything was correctly connected. Leaning forward she plugged the mains cable into the socket at the back of the bench and turned it on. Swiveling the chair around so she could see everyone watching her, she said, "This is the end result of quite a large amount of work over the last two or three months. It took me some time to come up with the original concept, build a proof of concept system, then develop enough to make this work, but I'm quite pleased with the end result."
"What does it do?" Doctor Langham, who had been leaning forward intently watching her the whole time.
"This," she said as she reached over the back of the computer and snapped the switch to the on position. The familiar two toned beep came, and the BBC BASIC prompt flicked into existence directly above her holographic display box. Hermione looked at it in satisfaction, internally relieved that it still worked after bouncing around in the boot on the way here as it would have been more than a little embarrassing to have had such a neat introduction fail horribly, then turned to see them all staring in shock. She tapped a few keys, showing that the display was live.
"It uses standard electronic methods to decode the RGB timing signals and feed the output through a HOP array that implements the projected light display," she explained, waving a finger through the text. "I managed to create an H-field to electromagnetic conversion system tuned for visible light, and mapped to the pixels of the video signal. It's a prototype and needs quite a lot of work still before I'm satisfied with it, but it works. I'm also half way through designing a method to interact with it. I've got a sort of keyboard device working in a very basic manner but I didn't bring it with me. I thought this would be enough of a demonstration."
Looking around at the blank faces, she added with a little worry, "Should I have brought it? We can do that next time. I'll probably have it working in a month or two."
Doctor Younan swallowed, then said rather faintly, "I think this is probably an ample demonstration of your theories, Miss Granger. Would you mind if I had a closer look?"
"Help yourself, Doctor," she replied politely, hopping down from the chair and waving him forward. "If you can see any problems I'd be grateful if you tell me what they are. You're the expert in electronics after all."
He nodded almost as an afterthought as he walked over and started prodding the keyboard, then waved a hand through the resulting text. By the look on his face he was quite chuffed with her work, which pleased her.
Half an hour later, she was going through her book and explaining parts of it to them all, the entire group having become even more excited than they had been heretofore. She answered a really quite large number of questions as accurately as she could, feeling pleased how seriously they were taking her work and making notes in her head about places she felt she could improve on it when someone came up with something she hadn't considered before.
Talking with real scientists was great fun, she concluded, feeling tired but content that the day had been well worth it. Even if they didn't yet have the answers she was looking for. Hopefully that was only a matter of time.
Lifting a hand in a wave to the Grangers as they drove off, Jerry watched until the car turned the corner, the lights vanishing, then slowly walked back to his office. Dropping into his chair he put his head in his hands and just held it for a while.
"Bit much, isn't it?" a voice said from the door.
"Just a little, yes," he agreed without moving his hands.
"I'd have thought you'd be happy," Christine said as she came into the room and sat down somewhere in front of his desk.
"I am. Absolutely ecstatic. But at the same time… it's almost too much. I've been working in this field for a decade without anything other than noise and the occasional oddity we could never replicate, then out of nowhere…" He removed his hands and lifted his head to meet his friend's oddly sympathetic gaze. "Everything I could ever have asked for just lands in my lap. That's going to take a while to sink in, I'm afraid."
"Be careful what you ask for in case you get it," Christine commented with a small smile.
"Indeed." Jerry kicked back in the chair and put his feet on the desk. "God. This is going to be the biggest revolution in scientific research in decades."
"Centuries, most likely," she replied quietly. "Every time I think about it I come up with something else that what those people can do changes. And that whole H-field theory… If that girl is right, she's probably given us the key to literally the most fundamental questions in physics. I can't even begin to understand what that is going to do. We really do need Hawking or someone of his ability."
Jerry nodded slowly. "And to think that all I wanted to do was see if they could affect an RNG consistently," he said after a moment or two. She grinned a little.
"Your aspirations were clearly insufficient," she replied.
"Apparently so." He looked at Hermione's book, then picked it up. "I should have got her to sign this before they left," he chuckled. "A signed first edition Granger thesis? Be worth a lot of money one day."
"I think she probably proved her point in the lab," his friend said wryly. "Farouk looked like he was going to pass out."
"Much like you did this morning."
"You did that on purpose, you bastard, and you know it."
He grinned at her. "Bloody right I did. Ghostbusters my arse." Getting up he took the book Hermione had given him with him, went next door with her following, and carefully locked it into the secure document safe. Then he went in search of the rest of the people who'd spent the day having their world upended.
It was definitely time for the pub.
Tomorrow he had a lot of work to do, but for today, he needed to relax.
Lying back in the seat Hermione relaxed, listening to the thrum of the tires on the road and the rumble of the engine. Headlights of vehicles coming the other way flickered across the inside of the car, briefly illuminating it every couple of seconds. She was very tired but felt that today had gone really well. There was now a whole team of people researching her ideas and the data they'd collected, which would probably produce some useful results, she'd got some good advice from Doctor Younan who had also promised to help her with making her holographic display into a proper PCB, and overall she couldn't have asked for a better outcome.
The only minor disappointment was that they'd been at it until so late there wasn't time to visit her father's old college, but he'd promised they'd do that when they came back in a few weeks for a longer stay. Doctor Langham had been very pleased that they'd agreed to that. Her parents would arrange to have a couple of locum dentists in for a week or so during the early summer vacation and they'd stay in Oxford over that period for more tests and research. Then at some point afterwards they'd take a day off to go down to Devon and visit her mother's parents, who she hadn't seen for nearly a year now. She was looking forward to wandering around on Dartmoor, because it was a nice place in the summer.
The rest of the summer she expected would quite full of new experiments and tests of her own. She had a lot of ideas already written down for further work, as well as studying what those hidden people were doing and thinking up ways to improve on some of the things that had inspired in her.
Now, though, she was exhausted and feeling that a nap was in order. Closing her eyes she spread her energy sense out as she always did when she slept, idly checking on that odd little variation in the field she'd noticed. It was still there, she saw, but she was intrigued by sensing it was slowly diminishing. As they drove she monitored it and finally decided that the fading suggested that the source, whatever that was, seemed to be behind them and off to the rear right, which would put it roughly south of Oxford. Finally it disappeared into the background level of the field, becoming undetectable to her senses. A few miles further and she got the first hit on one of the pseudoHOPs, somewhere off to the side as they passed High Wycombe. It was the same one she'd detected on the way to Oxford that morning, apparently not having moved.
She fell asleep wondering who made the things, and never felt her father carry her into the house an hour and a half later.