"One hundred and twenty-five?" King Carl XVI Gustaf raised his eyebrows in confusion.
The grey-haired scientists watching the boy began to smile. Professor Roberts, standing nearby, was grinning from ear to ear.
"Yes." Richard nodded solemnly. "One hundred and twenty-five gigaelectronvolts."
A quarter of the scientists gathered in the reception hall for the Nobel banquet abruptly stopped smiling. The physicists who understood what he meant stared in astonishment, their faces going slack. Quite a few of them looked as though their eyes were about to pop out of their heads.
One of the scientists could not restrain himself and exclaimed,
"That can't be right! That's nonsense! Where are your calculations? Your experimental results?"
Richie merely narrowed his eyes slyly in response, but when he caught the faintly disapproving look from Elizabeth II, he decided against saying anything else provocative. He only winked in farewell at the physicist who had challenged him. Naturally, everyone watching the stage at that moment saw it.
"Forgive me, Your Majesty," Richard said to the King of Sweden, putting on an apologetic expression. "I hope no one will be offended if I don't stay for the banquet? I have to get back to school."
Gustaf could not contain himself. His hearty laughter rang through the banquet hall. Others followed, and soon a wave of laughter swept across the room. Many of the physicists—indeed, practically all of them—assumed the boy had been joking about the mass of the Higgs boson. After all, in 1992 nothing was yet known about its mass. Under the normal course of events, its discovery was still decades away.
Some of the older physicists greatly appreciated the boy's wit. Only the man who had called out to Richard from the hall returned to his seat looking like an investor who had just discovered he'd been swindled.
He caught the knowing glances of his broadly grinning colleagues, whose expressions plainly said, You actually believed that joke? You thought a child, without any research at all, could tell you the exact mass of the Higgs boson? How naive can you be? Yet the mere fact that Richard Grosvenor knew about the Higgs boson and could joke about it raised him in the scientists' estimation from some little upstart who had somehow ended up there to a young genius.
Which was exactly what the boy had intended.
Grosvenor Junior also wanted to see the physicists' faces when the real mass of the Higgs boson was eventually announced after experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, and everyone started wondering how on earth he had known it years in advance.
The journalists attending the ceremony could smell a sensation. Camera shutters clicked loudly, flashes going off one after another like machine-gun fire. Some of the reporters were already working out whom they could interview for an explanation of the number uttered by the youngest Nobel laureate.
***
Accompanied by his bodyguards and the representative of the British Ministry of Magic, Richard returned to Hogwarts just in time for dinner.
The school was in uproar. By breakfast, every student already knew that Grosvenor had received a prestigious Muggle award. Many of them would not have cared in the slightest if the Hufflepuffs had not spread the story that Professor McGonagall was a Muggle-hater who, out of contempt for ordinary people, had refused to let Richard leave the school.
By the time the gossip had passed through several hands, it had grown to the point where, if one believed it, Professor McGonagall had all but come to blows with a student in front of the Headmaster, and only Dumbledore had managed, by some miracle, to drag the Deputy Headmistress away from Grosvenor.
The young witches and wizards could not have cared less about Muggle prizes, but the scandal fascinated them. Muggle-borns and half-bloods who lived in the ordinary world explained to the other students that the prize was not merely prestigious—it also came with a million dollars, which was worth more than a hundred thousand Galleons in wizarding money. At that point, the Muggle award suddenly became very impressive in the eyes of every wizard present. To them, that was a fortune.
During dinner, Richard was bombarded with questions by practically every Hufflepuff student. He could feel the professors watching him as well. Professor McGonagall looked furious. Severus Snape kept casting maliciously amused glances at his colleague, the Head of Gryffindor, while whenever his eyes fell on Grosvenor, he narrowed them in displeasure and curled his lip. Headmaster Dumbledore looked deeply thoughtful. Whenever he glanced at Richard, it was obvious that Albus was somewhat vexed. Only Gilderoy Lockhart could not remain seated at the staff table. The moment Richard left the bench, Lockhart came over to the Hufflepuff table.
"Richard!" Gilderoy beamed, slipping a patronising arm around the boy's shoulders. "Richard! Richard! Richard!"
Lockhart shook his head, and candlelight flashed brilliantly across his large, dazzling white teeth. Richard realised there had to be some kind of magic involved, because no such effect could possibly be achieved in ordinary life. He disliked both the overfamiliar manner and the close physical contact. To make his displeasure known, the boy lightly tapped his cane against the floor, though what he really wanted was to bring it down on the professor's foot. Gilderoy, however, did not care in the slightest. He completely missed the hint and continued,
"When I heard about it, I was absolutely stunned!"
"Sir?"
Richard raised his right eyebrow questioningly, his entire expression making his displeasure with the professor perfectly clear.
One remarkable thing about Lockhart was that even when he was silent, he somehow managed to keep his snow-white teeth on display.
"Richard, I've awakened vanity in you! I've infected you with the same virus. Before long, you'll be on the front page of the newspaper, just like me. You simply couldn't resist!"
(End of Chapter)
P@treon: /SadRaven
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