I would like to thank my beta, Kuilin.

Chapter 44.

Space Travel, Part I: Cheating

3:02 am, July 21st, 1993

Harry tossed and turned in his bed, and waked up from a familiar nightmare where the entire world was burning, he could hear people screaming everywhere, he wanted to save everyone, yet he couldn't do anything but to watch every sapient being burned alive. Harry gasped, and tried to clear his head. After a while, he got his wand in hand, and cast: "Tempus."

"3:02 am, July 21st, 1993" popped up in the air.

Harry sighed, and slowly sat up.

The multiple uses of Time-Turners each day, his sleeping disorder, plus the fact that his body was slowly but definitely building up resistance against the potion that prolonged his sleep cycle, meant that Harry's sleep cycle was more or less a mess now. During school times, Harry tried to synchronize his awake hours with the rest of the school, so that he could attend senior level classes, such as fifth- and sixth-year transfiguration, fifth-year arithmancy, and fourth- and fifth- year charms, etc. Harry and Hermione were only attending second-year herbology and third-year potions last year, though, because those two courses required too much practise and they simply didn't have enough time. Nowadays, Minerva, Severus, Mad-Eye, and basically everyone else, adjusted their time schedule to suit Harry's. If Harry wanted a Hebrew class at 3:30 am today, fine, either Headmistress Minerva McGonagall or the ill-tempered ex-Potions Master would get up and gave Harry the lecture without a single word of complaint. Of course, for the most part, Harry wouldn't be that insensitive, and he devoted such inconvenient awake time to solitary study and thinking.

Harry got up from bed, grabbed a breakfast bar from his pouch, and entered his trunk. After applying the privacy and security charms that he could manage without tiring himself out, and pressed the button in the locket that Severus gave him (Harry had Mad-Eye to check on it, obviously), Harry sat down by his desk, and drew out the Bayesian Graph Hermione and he drew out yesterday.

Yesterday, after viewing Hermione's memory, Harry had to admit that he, too, was shocked by the level of involvement in Muggle politics the Lords, Ladies, and Comrades were, how sane a good portion of them were, and how lucky the world had been in 1962. Of course, Hermione didn't respond too well to this kind of revelation at that time, and a more skilled negotiator such as Harry himself might be able to get more information from Grindelwald yesterday, but that was a risk that Harry had to take when he sent Hermione there in his place.

One of Harry's primary questions was why Grindelwald chose to reveal this secret in such a fashion.

-Lucius and Severus agreed that Grindelwald seemed to be quite urgent in something. Can it be that he, too, has heard of Prophecies about the world's destruction? In Dumbledore's letter to me, he mentioned that there had been a lot of Prophecies made about the end of the world, so it is almost impossible that only Dumbledore knew about them. Given that Grindelwald is so well connected, and the amount of resources that the other powerful wizards in contacts with him have at hand, the probability isn't bad.

Harry sighed.

-Probably, a lot of powerful wizards have been warned about the world's destruction. The eagerness they expressed toward the Stone may not mean that they are all self-serving bastards and bitches, or at least, they have REASONS to consider themselves not to be. They can honestly tell themselves that they are searching all possible means to prevent the world from destruction. However, only Dumbledore had access to all Prophecies, so that only Dumbledore could deduce the boy called Harry Potter was the only loophole in the web of Prophecies. As for the other people who wield real power, clever and/or sane they may be - they can't obtain their level of power by sheer luck - they don't have the full picture.

For an instant, Harry had the impulse to just tell everyone with real power the truth, that the Boy-Who-Lived was the only real hope the world had, so that they would all flock to protect Harry from any harm. However, Harry knew that would only cause disastrous results: some of the thirty-something top wizards, such as Grindelwald and Voldemort, would probably prefer to take things into their own hands, and "protect" Harry in their own way.

-Did Grindelwald receive a recent warning about the pending destruction of the world? Is that why he was so urgent? More importantly, if there is indeed a Prophecy about that, did it mention anything related to the origin of magic?

-Alternatively, could the new Prophecy about something related to the various Interdicts powerful wizards imposed on this world? Or rather, there was an old Prophecy that Grindelwald already knew of, and he learned something new out from it since he guessed out the relationship between Unbreakable Vows and Interdicts?

Harry's gaze moved to the stack of notes on his desk, which were duplicated from the original notes Dumbledore left to him, where Dumbledore guessed that the world had been way more magical than its current state, and dangerous usage of magic had pushed powerful wizards to impose one Interdict after another to prevent the world from destruction. Harry could understand why people did that, and he had impulses to make Interdicts of Harry from time to time.

However, it was just sad that people had to put so much constraints on themselves just to survive. If there hadn't been so many self-imposed shackles, with the magic that Merlin had, plus the current Muggle technology, human beings could be exploring other galaxies within the next one hundred years. In that way, human beings were much less likely to extinct if some stupid Muggleborn decided that transfiguring antimatter would be a good idea.

-Actually, since relatively powerful wizards such as Severus and Mad-Eye can do wandless free transfigurations, transfiguring something in high vacuum with proper electrical field applied around it into charged antiparticles could be a great way to gain almost infinite energy. Although we don't know if it is that easy to cheat yet, there is no reason that it isn't. With antimatter engines, instead of the current chemically powered engines, we can go to Mars in no time.

All of a sudden, a fantastic cheating idea came into Harry's mind: If it is true that the Interdict of Merlin and/or the Interdict on Electronics only work on or near the surface of Earth, we can get a duplicate of spacesuit, ask someone on our side (probably Hermione) to wear it, and ask Fawkes to take her the Moon. Probably, Hermione would be able to read notes left by ancient wizards, and we will gain really powerful knowledge from there.

Harry's heart was pounding fast, and his lips became dry. With a slightly trembled hand, he picked up the pencil.

-It is already known that phoenixes can bring someone from New Zealand to the United Kingdom without any problem, and the straight distance between New Zealand and the United Kingdom is… Let's say, between seven and eight thousand miles? And the distance between the Earth and the Moon is, err, 240,000 miles or so? Therefore, the question becomes whether Fawkes can travel about thirty-something times of its known capacity at once, or if not, whether it can travel consecutively thirty times.

-On another thought, if the distance between the Earth and the Moon isn't enough, would the distance between the Earth and the Mars do?

-By the way, does phoenix need to breath air? Should we give Fawkes a spacesuit, too?

As Harry noted down his thoughts, he couldn't help but to want to wake Hermione up, and discuss the idea with her; or to wake Severus up, and to ask him to go to Baikonur Cosmodrome and duplicate several spacesuits and early models of manned satellites.

The smile on the Boy-Who-Lived's face grew wider and wider.

Note: The Universe is very large. It is hard for me to accept that the rule of the entire Universe would change because someone like Merlin willed it - the Atlanteans were more powerful than Merlin, but they couldn't simply change the rule of the Universe to save themselves.