Amulet of Time 3: The Wolf and The Pelican

Chapter 20: The Order Grows

The headmaster gave Harry a blank look.

" What do you mean, Harry?"

Harry was a little surprised that he knew something that the headmaster didn't. He smiled back and began to explain his idea.

" The Hollerith System is the perfect solution to the problem. You said it yourself; there is little you can do to test loyalties short of dragging everyone to your office and dosing them up on veritaserum. Even getting Fawkes to test everyone would take a long time. It's alright for Order members, as they join a few at a time, but to do the whole school would be a little over the top. I can't think of any other efficient magical way of testing, so I think we will have to fall back on an old Muggle concept. It's old enough that even the Muggle borns won't question it. In fact, very few people will have heard of it."

" That's all well and good, Harry, but what exactly is it? And why do you think it will work?"

" Herman Hollerith was an American mathematician. Most of his work was done in the mid to late nineteenth century, and was centred on an idea he had for making a census more efficient. He worked with cards, which had holes punched in them to represent different information. It made it easier to count answers to questions in a census, and was very accurate. I'm not sure of the whole technical side of it, but basically it was a quick method of compiling survey information."

" But what does this have to do with anything?"

" Just bear with me, there is a point to this. Anyway, before the Second World War in the early 1930s, a census was carried out in Nazi Germany, and the answers were counted using a modified version of the Hollerith Electric Tabulating System. You see, some of the questions on the census were seemingly unimportant, but by using Hollerith's machine, the Nazis were able to determine which people were Jewish and which weren't, simply by the combination of responses they gave. The answers were punched on the cards, and by having a map of response variations, it was possible to work out everyone's ethnic origin with a very small error margin. This was later put to use during the Holocaust."

" I think I see where you're going with this," the headmaster murmured.

" What I'm getting at is that we could use the same principle. The Nazis found out who the Jews were simply by asking a series of seemingly innocent and random questions. We can do the same thing. We could come up with a form of test, probably written and multiple choice, that when tabulated will clearly show the loyalties of the students. If we do it in a sufficiently subtle way, no-one will ever know the true purpose of it. Then we'll take aside those who are suitable to join the Order and test them with Fawkes to make sure, and we keep an eye on any potential Death Eaters."

" And you're sure this will work?"

" Positive. We just say that the tests are part of an international survey of school children, or something to that effect, put everyone in the Great Hall under exam conditions, and no-one will ever know the difference."

Dumbledore sat back and thought about it carefully. What Harry was suggesting did seem to make sense, and if it was a Muggle technique, then even if the parents asked what it was about they would say it was simply a poll. People from wizarding families couldn't possibly see the ulterior motive behind it. Smiling, he grinned at a beaming Harry.

" Well, my boy, I think you have solved our problem."

It took two weeks for Harry's plan to come into fruition. Two days after the battle he was allowed out of the hospital wing, at which time he immediately called a full Order meeting. He needed more than just the Order council in on this, as it would take as many people as possible to devise the questions to be asked on the test. They had to be subtle enough to prevent suspicion, but also specific enough to give them an accurate picture of the students' loyalties. As soon as everyone had turned up, Harry had taken the floor and explained what his idea was. Many of the witches and wizards from old wizarding families scoffed at the idea of a Muggle invention being the answer, but most of the Muggleborns approved. Some of the older ones had even heard of it, and its success in the various instances it had been widely used. Yanika especially tried to win people over. She had been one of the people subjected to the census performed by the Nazis, and as a result had been classed as a gypsy and sent to one of the labour camps. She could see where Harry was coming from with this, and thought that while the machine itself, and the use of cards, may not be necessary, the basic principle was sound.