Harry was dropped off at 12 Grimauld Place. Kreacher opened the door as Harry reached the top step.
“Master! Kreacher has been frightened for you. You look tired. Come to the kitchen. Kreacher will feed you.”
“Thank-you Kreacher. That will be good.” Harry didn’t want to argue with anyone.
“Are there any messages?”
“Many Master. Minister Shacklebolt has sent many owls. There are many others.”
Harry sent a message by owl to The Burrow saying that he was home and Leo was safe.
The house was empty apart from Kreacher.
There was food from the galley during the flight. Like most airline food, it didn’t satisfy like a proper meal should. House-elf cooking was plain, old-fashioned, and satisfying. Harry loved it.
Harry had a long, hot bath. He should be delighted. The mission was completely successful, there were no more deaths, the potential disaster had been averted. He was hollow. There was no joy, no sense of achieving anything. Ginny had not come home.
The messages from Kingsley were in one pile on the desk in the library. They were all variations on the one theme; ‘Where are you?’; ‘What are you doing?’; ‘What has happened at Imperial College?’; ‘Where are those muggles?’. There were no messages from Ginny or any other Weasley.
There had been some short-term arrangements made during the flight. Harry had recommended that the teams should be careful until the attitude of the Ministry was known. Daphne would return to her mother’s house and stay there until further notice. Leo, John, Mary, Louisa, Graham, Roland, and Robert would return to Purbeck Square and stay there. Pimlico Security would maintain a watch in the square and in the mews. The Pimlico Super would return to running the London operation.
Anastasia and Jonathan would move into Swanfleet Hall. Anastasia’s son Peter would be collected from his father and taken to Swanfleet. Pimlico Security set up a permanent security watch on the house.
An invitation had been sent to MACUSA to send a dedicated liaison official to work with Anastasia leading up to her appointment with the MACUSA Directors.
The letter to Kingsley was carefully composed. There was no telling who would read it. The bare facts were laid out. The natural magic flow at the Imperial College had been shut down. There were no more muggle machines channelling magic. Harry had been to the USA where he had assisted MACUSA to free Leo Blake. Another uncontrolled natural magic flow in the USA had been shut down. The muggle machines channelling magic in the USA were no longer functioning. They were all being held by MACUSA.
The parchment was signed and sent by owl.
Two hours later Kingsley Shacklebolt arrived at 12 Grimauld Place.
“This is a difficult situation. I must insist that those muggles be Obliviated as soon as possible. Harry, you must see that we have no choice.”
“Minister, what happens next week when a muggle somewhere else in the world does the same thing. The Professor in California copied out how to do it and published it under his own name. It has gone out all over the world. All it needs is an uncontrolled natural magic flow to break out again and our world will be in danger.” Harry was feeling weary.
“We will just have to deal with that when it happens.” Kingsley was determined.
“What if it happens in China or Russia, places where wizards are in deep hiding. The muggles there would have all the time in the world to work out how to use it. They could easily be the wrong sort of muggle. We have got away with it here because our muggles are on our side. The two in the USA were just slow to work it out and were captured by a dark wizard before they could find out too much. They were not the right sort of people. MACUSA has Obliviated the technician, but the Professor was vanished by Lecky, the dark wizard. I am hoping that MACUSA can work back through the spells he cast to track down what happened.”
Harry prepared for his most difficult proposal.
“Minister, we have to establish a special arrangement for our muggle scientist allies. The wizarding world is too far behind the pace on this issue. We do not have a single wizard or witch who is anywhere near understanding what it is that is happening.”
“Harry, try to tell me what you know.”
“We have always treated magic as though we create it. That wizards perform magic because it comes from us, it is ours. It does what we want because it originates in us and is controlled by our thought and words. Natural uncontrolled flows of magic have been known since before anyone wrote anything down about magic. We always assumed that it was because there were a lot of wizards and witches located in one place that magic flowed and made that place special. The scientists have proof that it is something quite different.”
“They admit that magic is real, they can prove it using science?” Kingsley did not sound convinced.
“Proof is a hard subject, they have theories which they have used to design experiments, which have worked. In that way they have proof. They need to do a lot more work and run a lot more experiments before they can claim that they are certain about what is happening.”
“You are not convincing me.” Kingsley was definitely not convinced.
“The last talk I had with Dr Zaitseva went something like this. Muggle scientists have observed many inconsistencies in the universe. The relationship between the earth, the planets, the sun, all the suns and planets in our galaxy, all the galaxies in the universe, doesn’t add up. There are always unexplained forces at work. There are explanations about why there are problems. One of the explanations is that there are multiple parallel universes which co-exist with our own universe and interact with it. There might be many universes which occupy the same space. If we step from one universe to another it could be like entering a come-and-go space.”
“They have an explanation for magical spaces?”
“Yes, they asked the magic flow to make a space and it did.”
“What sort of space are you talking about?”
“One of the experiments the technician did in the USA was to ask the magic flow to create the Crac des Chevaliers. It is a Crusader Castle located in the south of Syria. The magic flow created the castle. It is a fair replica but not exactly the same. It appears when the person who knows about it wants to use it and disappears when it is not needed. It is a come-and go space. The original grassland where it is located is still there. It gets swapped from our universe to another universe created just for that purpose, in the same space.”
“Are all come-and-go spaces the same.”
“Dr Zaitseva says they are the same.” Harry paused to collect his thoughts.
“Then we come to the magic flow itself. Parallel universes don’t fit perfectly one with one another. There are imbalances so one pulls and pushes against the others. The energy flows out of the places where the universes are out of balance and appears to us as a flow of uncontrolled natural magic. There is a constant field of energy created by the general imbalance which we see as magic. Wizards, witches and magical creatures all focus the magic which is already there.”
“So, wizards and witches don’t make magic, it is there all the time.” Kingsley might be catching on.
“The scientists have also observed that magic seems to have its own sort of intelligence. They don’t have an explanation for this. In a magic flow a muggle electronic device will ask it to do something, and it does it. It doesn’t have to be fully formed with every detail, the magic flow connects with the human running the process and gets the detail out of their mind. Something like Legilimens. It is not human. There is no hint of knowing right from wrong, it just does what it is asked to do. There is no dark magic, that comes when a human directs the magic.”
“What are you proposing?”
“I want the Ministry to establish a small team to investigate how to predict natural magic flows and find out what we can do to control them. We should co-ordinate this with MACUSA. They already have the evidence in their possession of what was done in the USA. We will need at least two from the Department of Mysteries, and two researchers from MACUSA, and Dr Zaitseva, and Jonathan Brown, Dr Zaitseva’s assistant.”
“Are you sure that MACUSA will take it seriously?”
“Jane Goodman and Colin Patterson, who were the MACUSA aurors on the case have requested the same from MACUSA. Dr Zaitseva has been invited to speak to the Directorate in Washington.”
Kingsley looked at his shoes for a long time. Harry was holding his breath.
“Let me talk to the head of the Department of Mysteries. I will delay the orders to Obliviate the muggles for now. Don’t disappear again Harry and get some rest. You are still on leave.”
189Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡs11uVFtWut
