And Harry couldn't understand Professor Quirrell's words, it might have been an alien that had spoken, or an Artificial Intelligence, something built along such different lines from Harry that his brain couldn't be forced to operate in that mode.
You couldn't leave your home planet while it still contained a place like Azkaban.
You had to stay and fight.
Chapter 28: Reductionism
Whatever can go Rowling will go Rowling.
This should
"Okay," Harry said, swallowing. "Okay, Hermione, it's enough, you can stop."
The white sugar pill in front of Hermione still hadn't changed shape or color at all, even though she was concentrating harder than Harry had ever seen, her eyes squeezed shut, beads of sweat on her forehead, hand trembling as it gripped the wand -
"Hermione,
Slowly, Hermione's hand relaxed its grasp on the wand.
"I thought I felt it," she said in a bare whisper. "I thought I felt it start to Transfigure, just for a second."
There was a lump in Harry's throat. "You were probably imagining it. Hoping too hard."
"I probably was," she said. She looked like she wanted to cry.
Slowly, Harry took his mechanical pencil in his hand, and reached over to the sheet of paper with all the items crossed out, and drew a line through the item that said 'ALZHEIMER'S CURE'.
They couldn't have fed anyone a Transfigured pill. But Transfiguration, at least the kind they could do, didn't enchant the targets - it wouldn't Transfigure a regular broomstick into a flying one. So if Hermione had been able to make a pill at all, it would have been a
It hadn't been the sort of thing a wizard would think of, either. They didn't respect mere
Earlier, Harry had
"That was it for today, right?" said Hermione. She was slumped back in her chair, leaning her head against the back; and her face showed her tiredness, which was very unusual for Hermione. She liked to pretend she was limitless, at least when Harry was around.
"One more," Harry said cautiously, "but that one's small, plus it might actually work. I saved it for last because I was hoping we could end on an up note. It's real stuff, not like phasers. They've already made it in the laboratory, not like the Alzheimer's cure. And it's a generic substance, not specific like the lost books you tried to Transfigure copies of. I made a diagram of the molecular structure to show you. We just want to make it
Hermione sat back up, took it, and studied it, frowning. "These are
Harry made a disgusted face. He was still having trouble getting used to that sort of thing, it shouldn't matter what something was
Hermione looked up from the graph paper, her face surprised. "That's
"Yeah," Harry said, "just hard to make the Muggle way. If we could get enough of the stuff, we could use it to build a space elevator all the way up to geosynchronous orbit or higher, and in terms of delta-v that's halfway to anywhere in the Solar System. Plus we could throw out solar power satellites like confetti."
Hermione was frowning again. "Is this stuff
"I don't see why it wouldn't be," Harry said. "A buckytube is just a graphite sheet wrapped into a circular tube, basically, and graphite is the same stuff used in pencils -"
"I
Harry reached into a pocket of his robes, and produced a white thread tied to two small gray plastic rings at either end. He'd added drops of superglue where the thread met either ring, to make it all a single object that could be Transfigured as a whole. Cyanoacrylate, if Harry remembered correctly, worked by covalent bonds, and that was as close to being a "solid object" as you ever got in a world ultimately composed of tiny individual atoms. "When you're ready," Harry said, "try to Transfigure this into a set of aligned buckytube fibers embedded in two solid diamond rings."
"All right..." Hermione said slowly. "Harry, I feel like I just missed something."
Harry shrugged helplessly.
Hermione laid her wand against one plastic ring, and stared for a while.