Bringing Down the Mouse

by Ben Mezrich

  “But to get a coin to stay on a plate? That’s something else entirely.”

  He picked up the last coin, then centered himself in front of the counter. His back was to Charlie, so for a brief second Charlie couldn’t see what he was doing, but then with a flick of his wrist, Finn sent the coin in a high arc, up toward the ceiling, where the gaggle of stuffed animals hung, just like they had at the Sherwood Fair. The coin barely missed the lowest hanging animal—a Zebra with googly eyes—at the top of its arc, then dove straight down, hitting a plate in the direct center of the field. This time, the coin didn’t ricochet or hop from plate to plate. The coin hit the plate and stopped dead, planted firmly against the porcelain.

  “How did you do that?” Charlie asked.

  “Magic,” whispered Magic with a laugh.

  Finn turned back to Charlie. His face was completely serious.

  “Science looks a lot like magic when it’s applied correctly.”

  Winking, Finn suddenly pulled himself up onto the counter where the three coins had previous been stacked, then flung one jeaned leg over the top. Reaching down, he grabbed one of the plates off its base and held it up to show Charlie its smooth, shiny front surface.

  “The plates that they use in carnivals are usually polished porcelain or ceramic. Exceedingly smooth and shiny and slippery; in fact, sometimes the carnies even oil them up to make them even more so. Anything that hits them with any sort of horizontal force is going to slide or roll right off.”

  “And when you toss a coin forward,” Magic butted in, “you’re giving it a lot of horizontal force. The harder the toss, the more forward force. Which means in this game, the stronger you are, the worse you actually do.”

  Charlie nodded, taking it all in. Horizontal force, what Finn and Magic were talking about, in physics terms was forward velocity. The speed of an object moving forward multiplied by its weight. The coins didn’t have much weight, but even so, any reasonable amount of forward velocity was going to add up to enough force to make it hard for one of them to avoid sliding off the slippery surface of an oiled plate!

  Which is why Finn had obviously avoided as much forward velocity as he could.

  “So you arc the coin up, toward the ceiling. The more of an arc you give it, the less horizontal force, and the more force on the vertical, or up and down, axis.”

  “Give the kid a gold star,” Magic said. “Or maybe a gold coin. But see, there’s a problem with your solution, isn’t there?”

  Magic pointed toward the ceiling with a thick finger, and Charlie looked up, immediately seeing the jungle of stuffed animals.

  “That’s why they hang the stuffed animals right above the game,” Charlie murmured, a little awed at realizing something he’d never thought about before. “They’re trying to limit your vertical throw.”

  “Right,” Finn said, still straddling the counter. “You can’t get really good height at most carnivals because the doggone stuffed animals are hanging right there, like some chaotic zoological piñata. But with a little practice, you can still arc it up to some degree, giving yourself a little edge. And you need to make sure the coin isn’t spinning in the air. When a coin spins, it’s adding in all these new forces to the calculation, which you don’t want. And when it spins, you can’t be sure how it’s going to hit the plate. If it contacts that smooth surface with its edge, it’s going to roll right off. But if it lands flat, well, you’ve got a chance.”

  “But not much of one.” Magic sighed. “You’ve still got a bit of forward velocity to deal with, and you’ve got that incredibly slippery surface.”

  Charlie was amazed at how much was going on behind the scenes of something as simple as a carnival coin-toss game. Oiled plates? Stuffed animals hung in a way that was designed to lessen your chances of winning? It certainly didn’t seem fair.

  “So how do you get the coin to stay on the plate?”

  Finn smiled.

  “We add a little chemistry.”

  Then he did something that took Charlie completely by surprise. He reached down behind the counter and retrieved one of the gold coins, then held it up in front of his face, stuck out his tongue, and licked it.

  “Ninety-eight percent water, about two percent enzymes that break down starches. A little mucus, a few other elements depending on your diet and your genetic makeup. Saliva, Charlie. It’s a pretty nifty chemical, lots of cool properties that most people don’t know about, and even more important, you’ve always got some with you.”

  He turned, gave the coin a flick with his wrist. It went up, up, up, just avoided the bottom of the googly-eyed zebra, then dropped down, sticking to the same plate that he’d landed the last coin on: clunk. A perfect winner.

  “You put spit on the coin,” Charlie murmured. Magic squeezed his shoulder.

  “Works even better if you eat something heavy in dairy right before you play. Ice cream, maybe some yogurt, it increases the thickness of the mucus.”

  “On a microscopic level,” Finn said as if he were giving a book report, “the enzymes in your saliva have all these protein-size attractor points that grip the tiny imperfections in the plate, the grooves you could only see with a microscope—”

  “Friction,” Charlie said. “You create friction by licking the coin. Just enough that if the coin hits the plate flat on—”

  “It’s going to stick.” Finn grinned.

  Charlie whistled low. “That’s pretty cool.”

  Finn pulled his leg back over the counter and put his boots back to the floor. He stretched, then straightened the sleeves of his ever-present leather jacket.

  “Yeah, it’s cool. But even when you know what you’re doing, it’s not as easy as it looks. It takes practice. Lots of practice. A couple of hours a day, a few times a week, and maybe you’ll be as good as me.”

  Physics and chemistry. Not strength, not even accuracy, really, though you’d need to practice the motion until you had the skill, until you could get the arc right and keep the coin from spinning in the air. But physics and chemistry, that’s really what it was. That’s how you beat the game. Charlie felt like he was on fire, eager to get started, eager to teach himself how to throw the coins as well as Finn, maybe even better than Finn. He started forward toward the counter, but Finn stopped him with a hand.

  “Being good enough to do this nine out of ten times isn’t enough. Because it’s all in the way you do it. That look on your face right now, the way you’re going for the coins—Charlie, that’s going to end this for you before you even start.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got to disguise your movements. You’ve watched me beat this game here and at Sherwood. You ever see me licking any coins? No, because I do it fast, easy, cool—in a way that nobody can see me doing it. You’ve got to learn to play it cool. You’ve got to hit the game, land the coins, then get out without the carny ever realizing what you’ve done. And if you’re going to keep hitting the same game over and over, you’ve got to play different roles so he doesn’t recognize you each time. We’re not talking major disguises here, we’re just talking wearing a hat, maybe a different jacket—”

  “Fake names,” Charlie said, eyes widening. “Fake personalities.”

  Magic leaned toward him dramatically.

  “Second rule of the Carnival Killers. Always be in character.”

  “Is all that really necessary?” Charlie asked. “I mean, are they really watching over these games so carefully?”

  Finn shrugged.

  “It’s better to be thorough than to get caught, right?”

  Charlie swallowed. His throat felt a little tight.

  “What happens if you get caught?”

  Magic playfully punched his shoulder, laughing away Charlie’s sudden tension.

  “Spitting on a coin? Tossing the coin the correct way to win the game? There’s nothing illegal about that. You’re just using your brain to beat them. They won’t like it, but they can’t get you in trouble fo
r it.”

  “Which doesn’t mean you stick around if they do start giving you problems,” Finn said.

  “Which brings us to the third rule of the Carnival Killers,” Magic finished for him. He took Charlie by the shoulders, spun him around so they were face-to-face, sneering at him, nose crinkled and teeth clenched in full view like a wolf threatening its prey.

  “Always be ready to run.”

  Magic laughed again, but Charlie couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not. Before he could belabor the point, Finn was ushering him out of Magic’s grip and toward the second fair game, a counter of darts and a wall of balloons.

  10

  CHARLIE WANTED TO CLOSE his eyes. He wanted to scream. He wanted to do anything but what he was doing—standing there, frozen in place, his arm out in front of him, palm up, watching with terror as the metal dart plunged down through the air, racing toward his skin.

  “Wait!” he finally shouted, but it was too late.

  The dart reached his palm and the cold steel hit his skin, directly in the center, the soft unguarded flesh, an inch from the base of his fingers, and he opened his mouth to let out a noise—

  And then, nothing. The steel point creased his skin but didn’t even come close to piercing. In fact, it didn’t hurt at all. Other than the coldness of the metal and the pressure from the downward arc of the dart, there was little to no sensation. The thing was so dull that even though Daniel had jabbed it down at his hand with fairly good speed and accuracy, it hadn’t harmed him at all. Which, obviously, was the point.

  Charlie turned his attention from the dart to the freckled face peering down at him.

  “And they’re all like this,” Daniel said, bringing the dart back up to eye level. “They grind them down to make them as dull as possible. But that’s not even the worst part.”

  He gestured to Jake, the soccer kid, who was a few feet to his left down the counter. Jake picked up one of the other darts and tossed it toward the balloons affixed to the wall. The dart hit one of the balloons dead on, and harmlessly fell to the floor. The balloon continued to wobble after the dart disappeared, a trembling blob of bright yellow. Charlie couldn’t help wondering which of the kids had spent the necessary hours blowing up all those things. There had to be thirty, forty balloons attached to the wall.

  “The balloons are only about three-quarters full. The latex is loose, nowhere near stretched to capacity. Which means that when a dull dart hits it, ninety-nine out of a hundred times the dart is going to just bounce right off.”

  Charlie nodded, still listening to Finn and Magic’s coins clinking loudly against the plates. He tossed a glance over his shoulder, back toward where Miranda was still sitting in one of the drafting chairs, scribbling in a notepad. He wondered if she was taking notes about the teaching session for the paper she was going to write about their team.

  The more Charlie learned about how even these supposedly “beatable” fair games worked, the better he felt about what he was getting into. With the darts and balloons, the deck seemed stacked heavily against the player. Under-filled balloons? Dulled darts? Like the oiled plates and the low-hanging stuffed animals, it seemed that the fair games were anything but fair. Carnival Killers? If the carnivals were so rigged against poor unaware kids who spent their allowances trying to win prizes—well, didn’t the carnivals deserve to get killed? Was it cheating to even the odds of an unfair game?

  “So how do you beat the balloons?” Charlie asked, narrowing his eyes.

  Daniel smiled, the freckles around his mouth dancing like orange raindrops across a pasty white windowpane.

  “I like your attitude.”

  He showed Charlie the dart, then did something bizarre. Without a word, he slid the dart down into his pocket. He held the dart there for a few seconds, then brought the dart back up, swung on his heels, and hurled it toward the balloons.

  There was a loud pop as one of the balloon burst into a million pieces.

  “Wow,” Charlie said.

  “Yeah, wow,” Jake responded from a few feet away. He brought a dart out of his pocket and flung it toward the balloons. Again, another loud pop, another balloon bursting emphatically.

  “What the heck is in your pockets?”

  Daniel reached in and pulled out a small white piece of material that looked like a thick gauze bandage. He held it out toward Charlie.

  “Careful, now.”

  Charlie raised an eyebrow, reached forward to touch the bandage, and jerked his hand back. The thing was hot. Not searingly so, but enough to make him wince.

  “It’s a heat wrap,” Daniel said. “You know, the kind you can find at any drugstore. People use them for pulled muscles or aching joints.”

  Charlie had seen heat wraps many times before. His father had gone through a racquetball phase when Charlie was in fifth grade. Before that, it had been pickup basketball with a few of the other professors at MIT. His father had worked through so many heat wraps, ace bandages, and Advil bottles, sometimes his medicine cabinet looked like the Celtics’ locker room.

  “You use them to heat up the darts,” Charlie said.

  Daniel nodded. Charlie instantly understood. Again, it was physics and chemistry mixed together to beat bad odds. His father had explained how the chemical filled heat packs worked, because Charlie had essentially been born naturally curious. Heat packs were actually made up of two separate compartments, one filled with liquid, usually water, the other with chemicals such as calcium or magnesium sulfate. When the pack was opened, the two compartments were combined, causing a chemical reaction that released energy via heat.

  “The second law of thermodynamics,” Charlie continued. “Heat always moves toward an equilibrium. The atoms excited by the chemical reaction give off energy, which travels from atom to atom through anything it touches, heating up the cooler materials until everything is an even temperature. In other words, you hold the dart against the heat pack, the metal heats up. And when you throw the dart at the balloon, that heat is transferred to the atomic structure of the latex, breaking those bonds—”

  “And popping the balloon,” Jake finished, tossing another dart that hit with another loud pop.

  Again, physics and chemistry, the science of ballistics meeting the laws of thermodynamics. But this time, unlike with the coin toss, Daniel and Jake had added something that wasn’t really part of the game—the heating pack. Charlie wasn’t sure, but it felt like that was a little more like cheating.

  Then again, the game was unfair. You couldn’t really win the way the game was designed. And what were you really adding? You weren’t throwing anything but the dart. You weren’t moving closer to the balloons or really breaking any rules that Charlie could name. You were adding heat, which wasn’t even something physical or quantifiable.

  It was pretty ingenious, actually. The heated darts flipped the odds of the game on their head. Nine out of ten times, you’d probably pop those balloons. They were easy to hit, and with the heat reacting with the latex material, well, there would be a whole lot of popping going on.

  Charlie was eager to give it a try himself. He was about to reach for one of the darts when Daniel caught his hand, then pointed over his shoulder.

  “There’s still one more game to beat,” he said.

  Charlie followed the kid’s freckled finger. Greg was standing at the base of the rope ladder, arms crossed against his chest, a bored look on his face. Behind him, halfway up the ladder, Sam smiled toward Charlie, then gracefully scrambled up the last few feet along the swaying rope material and hit the bell with an outstretched hand.

  11

  THE RINGING IN CHARLIE’S ears seemed to continue even after the bell had stopped trembling; he used the few seconds it took to get from the balloon-dart counter to the base of the rope ladder to clear his head. He wasn’t sure what it was about Sam that seemed to continually catch him off guard, but every time she looked at him, it was kind of like getting splashed with water.

  By the tim
e he reached the base of the rope ladder, she had clambered back down from the bell and was standing next to Greg, who still had his arms crossed, a smug look on his face. His shirt was bright green with a designer label, the collar starched so high it nearly touched his ears. Sam, in contrast, was in an oversize sweatshirt and ripped jeans. Her outfit would have gotten her sent home during regular school hours, but this late, nobody would be roaming the halls other than athletes on their way home from various practices and the odd musical prodigy coming back from one of the practice rooms on the school’s lowest floor.

  Charlie was surprised to see that she wasn’t even breathing hard; she’d gone up and down the rope ladder in a near blur, so fast he hadn’t even seen where she’d put her hands and feet. The ladder was still swinging a bit behind her, and the way it rocked back and forth sent chills down Charlie’s spine.

  Like the other games in the room, he’d tried the rope ladder before a few times in his life, at various fairs and carnivals that his parents had taken him to over the years. The results had always been the same. Charlie knew his limitations: He wasn’t a good athlete, he didn’t have great balance, and though he could do math and science on a high-school level, the strength of his arms and legs was barely beyond that of a toddler’s. He’d always sucked at all things physical. His father had told him that those things only mattered until you were eighteen, and then it all reversed, and all anyone cared about was what you could do with your brain. Charlie had suspected that that was the sort of thing fathers always told athletically inept sons. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but eighteen years seemed like a heck of a long time to wait for the tables to turn.

  Greg’s eyes seemed to be telling Charlie the same thing as he looked him over.

  “I guess we better get this over with.” He sniffed, waving Charlie toward the still-swinging ladder. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”