Chapter 39

"I have to admit I have no idea what this is," said Hermione, staring at the odd arrangement of shelves before her.

She and Imogen were in the boy's dormitory. The school's founders in their wisdom had protected the girls' sleeping quarters from the intrusion of any boy, but the boys' dormitory, in their view, was in need of no such protection, and so the two girls accompanied by Neville, Ron and Harry were able to climb the stairs to the fifth year boys' quarters and admire Imogen's handiwork. The table next to Neville's bed was gone, as was the solitary cauldron brewing Felix Felicitas. Now instead was a floor-to-ceiling rack filled top to bottom with shelving. The uppermost shelf tilted to the right. The shelf below it leaned in the opposite direction, and below it the shelves continued in a similar sequence, so that the arrangement had the appearance of a series of steeply sloping staircases, zig-zagging back and forth from top to bottom. The shelves were crammed with cauldrons, connected throughout by tubes.

"Brilliant, isn't it?" said Neville to Harry, sitting on Neville's bed with Ron. Harry was rather impressed with the work done in his absence. "Imogen," continued Neville, "Why don't you tell everyone how it works?" While Neville had helped Imogen construct the edifice, he did not really understand how it functioned, and he hoped that by hearing Imogen explain it once more that perhaps he might get a better idea of what she had created.

"It's a cascade," said Imogen. "I learned from Neville just how tedious it is to make the Felix Felicitas potion. You take a cauldron, and start heating the various ingredients. Vapor rises through tubing, and condenses into a basin. You then take what has collected in the basin, and start the process again, each distillation increasing the purity of the potion, until finally, after many months, you have a small quantity of the true thing. The process can't be speeded up, at least not that I know of. But I think I've created a method that greatly increases the output nonetheless."

Hermione needed no further explanation to grasp what Imogen had done. It was breathtakingly simple, but ingenious in its simplicity. The ingredients in the first cauldron, once heated, evaporated, condensed and then flowed automatically into the next cauldron in line, where the process was repeated, and then the liquid moved on to the next cauldron in line. This was repeated over and over until, after some months, the final cauldron finished its work and released the finished product into a basin on the lowest shelf. It was true that Imogen's method did not speed up the process. But it did mean that once the process was underway and all cauldrons in operation, that each day, every day a small amount of Felix Felicitas would be brewed. It was now possible to mass-produce the lucky potion.

"But what about the stirring?" said Hermione. "That's the really tricky part, according to Neville. The stirring is at irregular intervals. However will you get dozens of stirring sticks to move at precisely the right time for each stage of the potion?"

"Yes, that was the more difficult part," said Imogen. "I used a variation on the Automatia charm, a Muggle-inspired variation, as it happens, just like the cascade idea itself. The cascade was used by Muggles during the last war to help them make their most powerful weapon. Skeeter told me about it as an example of Muggle cleverness. Now the modified Automatia charm I'm using I found in the library. It's called the Turing charm, named after a Muggle by that name. It's kind of complicated, but basically it's a way of giving an object a path of instructions to follow until a conclusion is reached. The basic idea is wonderfully simple, but the results you can achieve with it are amazingly complex."

"Would you be able to teach me how you did this?" said Hermione, thrilled by what Imogen had done, and was eager to learn all she could. But the question caused Imogen to blush slightly, and after a pause, she explained that she had had some help - actually, a lot of help - from Professor Flitwick. The charms professor had not known Imogen's purpose, and thinking she was seeking his help with a purely theoretical problem, had given her a detailed lecture on the subject. She had attended carefully to his instructions, and had been able to implement them, without quite understanding the theory underlying the magic.

"But I took careful notes of what he said," continued Imogen, "and I'll show them to you. I would love to learn how to create my own Turing charms. Think of the endless possibilities!"

"How could a charm have been named after a Muggle?" asked Neville, his foot gently nudging some dirty underwear under his bed, but not in time for it to have escaped the girls' notice.

"It's a rather sad story, actually," said Imogen. "Turing used his ideas during the war to make machines that could do the most amazing things. So amazing, in fact, that they came to the attention of the Ministry. They sent some Aurors to investigate, demanding to know how Turing's machines worked. He explained everything to them, but they could not understand, and they thought that he must be a wizard, and that his machines were magical: a serious breach of wizarding law. He was arrested, and tried before the Wizengamot, but before he could be sentenced, he committed suicide. The Ministry was so stupid then, just like now. Skeeter told me that the same thing happened to another Muggle who invented something called the 'Enigma machine'. Anyways, eventually the Ministry figured out how Turing's machines worked. Twenty years too late to save Turing, unfortunately. Once they learned Turing's theories, some wizards began to apply them to creating new spells, and the Turing charm was the first. Flitwick's published a few papers on them. I got one from the library at the start of term, but it was too complicated for me. I hope he'll help me to understand it."

Only the first cauldron was in operation, and as the teens watched, wisps of vapor rising from the heated liquid rose, collected in a funnel, and then condensed into a fog, the tubing now translucent. After a while, a tiny drop appeared in the tube and ran down, faster and faster until it fell into the cauldron next in line. Suddenly the stirring stick in the first cauldron sprang to life, twirled exactly seventeen times, and then became dormant once more. There was a silence, and then Ron's stomach growled mightily, a signal that it was time to head for the great hall and dinner.

For a Saturday night, the staff table was unusually well-occupied. Indeed, it was almost full, whereas often on the week-end a number of staff would be away from the school, either in Hogsmeade or elsewhere on personal business. As usual, Professor Trelawney was absent, for she had always preferred to take her meals in her room. Dinner was not very enjoyable if one had to maintain a pretense to abilities one did not possess. Hagrid too was absent, and this was perhaps on Madam Pomfrey's orders. The half-giant had been to the infirmary earlier that day, looking rather mauled: an increasingly common occurrence. But the rest of the staff were present, and the atmosphere was lively and cheerful. Dumbledore had evicted everyone from their usual seats, requiring them to pick a number at random from his hat to determine their place at the table.

At the start of the dinner the Headmaster regretted that he had not taken measures to magically predetermine the outcome, for at his right-hand side sat Umbridge. His opinion of her had been fixed within a week of the woman's arrival at the school. Without a doubt, Umbridge was the ugliest, most foul beast that ever heaved its bulk across the face of the protesting earth. She was not really an enemy, and so Dumbledore could not destroy her. She was not a Death Eater, and so he could not have her arrested and imprisoned. She was too stupid to understand his jokes, and so mocking her was almost too cruel. And so all that was left to Dumbledore was to endure the simpering, sacrin voice; to put up with the blundering attempts at sarcastic remarks; to suffer the complaisant way she mouthed platitudes as if they were pearls of wisdom she had herself had invented. Shortly after the dinner had started, the almighty High Inquisitor began to address Dumbledore, her ill breath washing over him as the creature in an attempt at polite conversation asked him how he did. He fortified himself with a goblet of elderberry wine, throwing his head back and draining the vessel dry. It was going to be a long dinner.

The rest of the table was doing rather better. Snape found himself seated at the very end, Madam Pomfrey on his right. Across from him was Babbling, the Ancient Runes professor, in deep conversation with her neighbour, leaving Snape free to talk at length with Pomfrey without fear of being overheard, as long as they did not speak too loudly.

"It's going splendidly," said Snape, in response to Pomfrey's inquiries about his therapy. "You could not have done better than to refer me to Dr. Ricci. Would you believe that at first I actually doubted that a Muggle could do anything for me? I wonder now at how I could have been so simple. So biased. So..." Snape paused, searching for the right comparison.

"So like a wizard?" suggested Pomfrey helpfully.

"Exactly!" replied Snape. "That's exactly it. We magical folk withdrew from the Muggle world millenia ago. Perhaps we had good reason then, but I question now whether it serves us to live so apart from our fellow human beings. In my weekly trips to Dr. Ricci's office, I've learned more about the Muggle world than I'd learned in all my life before. There is so much they do without magic - really they have no need of it. Shall I give you an example?"

Pomfrey nodded enthusiastically.

"Well, listen to this. In Dr. Ricci's office, the very first day while waiting for her to arrive, I was looking at the artwork in her office. Some of the paintings were recognizable enough. and some were those photographs they do - you know, the Muggle ones that can't move. Now on the doctor's desk was a black painting - just black, and nothing else. 'How boring', I thought. But then, at the end of our session, Dr. Ricci went over to her desk to put our next appointment in her calendar. I thought she was going to pick up one of those Muggle quills and write something. Instead, she pushed a button on the black painting - and it lit up! From jet black to colours bright as day, in an instant. The most amazing thing! And this, I learned, was her calendar. And she made entries on it without even touching it, instead tapping away on her desk! It was weeks before I learned the thing's name. A 'computer': a most incredible device."