Charlie Numbers and the Man in the Moon

by Ben Mezrich

  “Wow, thanks. My name is Charlie, and that’s my team over there. Except for the girl with the ponytail.”

  “Kelly. Yes, I recognize her from last year. She’s got a real chance. If I remember correctly, her team had some pretty good designs. I think we beat them in the semis by a hair. If they kept at it during the off-season, they’ll be real trouble this time around. Maybe even make it to the trophy. Then again, we haven’t seen what you guys can do yet.”

  Caldwell was still smiling as Charlie took the plane into his hands. It was a far cry from anything he or the Whiz Kids had made.

  “It’s a whale of a competition,” Caldwell continued. “Sometimes it’s tough being the reigning champion, because you always want to outdo yourself the next year. There’s a lot of expectations, a lot of pressure to win again. Man, I think my father has already cleared out space on his shelf for another trophy.”

  If anyone else had said the words, it might have sounded like bragging, but there was something so genuine and sincere about Caldwell, Charlie realized he was simply being honest. Charlie felt another pang of guilt; this kid wasn’t just smart and innocent—he was nice. And it appeared that his father had more than a passing interest in his kid’s abilities; he was probably one of those dads that expected a lot from his son. Charlie was lucky that his own parents put very little pressure on him. He couldn’t remember a single time when they’d hovered over him at some sort of competition, pushing him harder than he pushed himself. Then again, his parents were so absentminded and caught up in their own research, he’d have had to hit them over the head with a trophy just to let them know he had won it.

  Charlie handed the airplane back to Caldwell.

  “It’s really great. I don’t think you’re going to have any trouble taking us down, with a design that good.”

  “You’ll get there,” Caldwell said. “A little hard work, a little practice. A lot of luck.”

  Judging from the precise nature of his airplane, and the fact that Caldwell had been practicing at the Reflecting Pool when all the other competitors had been at the opening reception banquet, Charlie guessed that Caldwell didn’t leave very much up to luck. Smart, nice, and dedicated.

  Charlie hoped Anastasia had her facts straight. Charlie considered himself a pretty good judge of character, and if first impressions meant anything, Richard Caldwell didn’t seem to have a dishonest bone in his body. It was hard to imagine that his father—the astronaut—was any different. Maybe Anastasia had it wrong; maybe Buzz Caldwell had nothing to do with the missing moon rocks, and this was all for nothing.

  As Charlie thanked Caldwell again and headed back to Kelly and his team, he wondered if he was really going to be able to go through all of it. Getting close to Caldwell, just to find a way into his father’s world.

  Then again, to really get close to Caldwell, his team would have to stay in the competition as long as possible, hopefully all the way to the finals. Judging from what he’d just seen—that perfectly folded origami plane floating above the Reflecting Pool—he had a sinking feeling he and his friends would be on that Acela back to Boston sooner than Anastasia and her colleague might have expected.

  Of course, that would mean no prize money—and no NASA.

  Glancing back at Caldwell—who still had that amiable smile on his face, beneath those locks of auburn hair—Charlie convinced himself there was no real reason to feel bad about anything. Either they were going to lose the competition, fast and furious, and Anastasia would have to find another way to investigate Caldwell’s dad, or they were going to somehow transform themselves into brilliant paper airplane designers, win cash prizes and introductions to NASA, and maybe even clear Caldwell’s father’s name in the process.

  To Charlie, that sounded like win, win, and win. And heck, there would even be a nice shiny trophy involved. Win, win, win, and win.

  9

  TWELVE HOURS LATER, THE natural sunlight streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the main atrium of the National Air and Space Museum chased the last remnants of sleep from Charlie’s eyes, as he and his crew entered the Smithsonian’s most popular exhibit: Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall. Charlie’s team was already a few minutes late for the day’s practice trials—billed as their first chance to compete against one of the other teams, even though it wouldn’t count as part of the actual competition—but it was impossible to rush through a place filled with mankind’s greatest achievements in taming the skies. From the buzz and chatter that surrounded Charlie, it appeared the other competitors felt the same way; a hundred kids, as well as a smattering of adult proctors, made for quite a noise. Even though the place was closed to the general public, Charlie had to shout just to be heard over the palpable, constant din.

  “We’re definitely in the right place. If you need to figure out how to make something fly, might as well start at the finish line and work your way back.”

  Charlie pointed toward the burnt-orange capsule standing directly across from the entrance, surrounded by kids taking pictures. Jeremy was already jogging toward the vessel, his gangly arms swinging excitedly by his sides. The Apollo 11 command module Columbia wasn’t the most sophisticated spaceship in the atrium, but it was perhaps the most historical. Fifteen feet tall, vaguely pyramid in shape, it had once carried Neil Armstrong all the way to the moon and back. If modern flight had started with the first airplane built by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk—something every kid at Nagassack learned about at the start of middle school—it had surely reached its pinnacle with the first steps on the moon.

  “Could you imagine being stuck in that thing for eighty hours?” Marion said, as they caught up to Jeremy at the back of the crowd around the capsule. “And we thought the four of us in one hotel room seemed cramped. Last night was positively palatial compared to space travel.”

  Charlie laughed. The previous night’s accommodations had been tight: two of the boys to each of the two queen beds, and Crystal in her own room because she was the only girl. Crystal was bragging about her spacious extra bed, which didn’t sit well with Kentaro. Of course, he could have slept on a throw pillow and had room to spare, but that hadn’t kept him from complaining until well after two in the morning. One bathroom for four boys had ensured their late start even after Anastasia had sent Porter to pound on their doors at six a.m. Although Charlie could have skipped his shower—he didn’t need cold water to help wake him up after seeing Porter’s chiseled visage through the peephole. If that man ever smiled, it would be like a crack appearing in a glacial wall.

  After a few minutes contemplating an eighty-hour trip to the moon in a sophisticated tin can, with Jeremy’s elbow in his ear and Marion’s feet jammed against his back, Charlie turned his attention to the exhibit directly behind the Apollo 11 capsule, the touchable moon rock. Ironic, to see the sample from the Apollo 17 journey to the moon, recovered from the landing site in the Taurus-Litrow Valley, set atop a pedestal for visitors to inspect and even touch. The humble appearance of the iron-rich, finely textured volcanic rock, basalt, did not reflect its true age, which was nearly four billion years. As first Jeremy, then Kentaro, Marion, and Crystal took turns touching the precious, priceless specimen, Charlie remembered back to the vial he had held in his hands. A piece of real history, the natural extension of human endeavor from the Wright brothers to the space program, a piece of the moon.

  That was really why they were all there, in Washington. That was why they had spent the night sharing beds and dreaming about folding sheets of paper into airplanes—why Crystal had spent an entire hour before that watching YouTube videos of paper airplanes in flight, while Kentaro, Marion, Jeremy, and Charlie had folded sheet after sheet, thrown design after design toward the bathtub, the farthest distance they could reach without leaving their room.

  Somebody had stolen moon rocks, and Charlie was going to help get them back.

  “I’m glad you all finally decided to make an appearance.” Anastasia’s voice suddenly interrup
ted his thoughts, as she swept into view on the other side of the moon rock touch display. “I was beginning to think I’d have to send Mr. Porter to collect you. As you can imagine, Mr. Porter is not a particularly patient man.”

  Charlie detected a bit of venom in Anastasia’s voice; the tone was alarming, especially considering up to that point she had been perfectly friendly, even charming. He wondered if something had changed—or perhaps it was just that she didn’t like being kept waiting. Charlie’s mother could get testy when his father was late—which was quite often—and she wasn’t even involved in a NASA investigation.

  “Sorry,” Charlie said. “We were studying late. From what we’ve seen so far, it appears we’re a bit less experienced than the other teams we’ve met.”

  He hadn’t mentioned to Anastasia yet his impromptu meeting with Caldwell the night before; for some reason, he had decided to keep his impressions of the kid to himself, for the moment. He had no reason not to trust Anastasia, but he knew she already suspected Caldwell’s father of being involved in a theft. He assumed that would color her opinion of the man’s son, maybe unfairly.

  “That’s only natural,” Anastasia said as she gestured for Charlie and his friends to follow her deeper into the atrium. “Considering they’ve all competed before.”

  Charlie had to jog to keep up with Anastasia’s long gait. She’d traded her suit for black leggings and a black knit top with long sleeves, but her sunglasses were still covering much of her face, shielding her expression. Mr. Porter was nowhere to be seen, but Charlie guessed he was somewhere in the vicinity, perhaps watching from the second-floor landing.

  “What do you mean?” Charlie asked. “I know Richard Caldwell has been here before, but I assumed some of the other teams were new to the competition, like us.”

  Passing beyond the touchable moon rock, they crossed between a pair of slightly older spacecraft. First up was the Gemini 4 capsule, which was encased in molded Plexiglas and perched right next to the actual space suit worn by astronaut Edward H. White. The plaque that bore his name and the date June 3, 1965, stated that he became the first American to perform a space walk. This was of note because he beat the Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov by three months. Next to Gemini 4 sat Mercury Friendship 7, a nine-foot-tall, 2,900-pound titanium vessel that had carried the first American to orbit the Earth, John H. Glenn Jr., back in 1962. Each one of these greats in flight symbolized a milestone of accomplishment.

  “Yes, most of them are new to this competition. But they’ve all competed before.”

  Moving out of the Milestones of Flight Hall, they headed into a hallway labeled THE FLIGHT SIMULATOR WING. At the entrance to the hallway they passed beneath a pair of odd-looking vessels suspended from the ceiling by high-tensile metal wires. One of the vessels looked like the giant wings of some sort of mechanical butterfly, made of crisscrossing wooden beams. The other was a cross between a massive wooden biplane and the rounded base of a more modern blimp.

  “The Lilienthal Glider and the Ecker Flying Boat,” Anastasia commented, as Jeremy lifted Kentaro a few inches off the ground so he could get a better look. “Some early attempts at sustained flight.”

  “A boat with wings,” Jeremy said, shaking his head. “Seems like a long way from that to a space capsule—”

  “Hold on,” Charlie interrupted. “Anastasia, what are you saying? All these other teams have competed before?”

  Anastasia didn’t slow her gait, taking them past a huge cavern of a room marked AMERICA BY AIR. The nose of a massive Boeing 747 sat a few yards inside the doorway. Marion had jogged ahead to stop just a few feet from a velvet rope in front of the towering nose. He quickly grabbed his drawing pad from his backpack and started to sketch what he was seeing. The motion of his hand was elegant and quick as he faithfully recreated the curves of the plane, leading up to where the cockpit would have been, if it hadn’t simply been a model rather than the real thing.

  “Great, Marion,” Kentaro said. “If we can only figure out how to fold enough paper to make four, one-hundred-ten-thousand-horsepower engines, this will really help.”

  “Hey, you never know,” Marion said. “Da Vinci started with sketches. Then he invented the helicopter.”

  “And five hundred years later someone actually built one that worked,” Jeremy said.

  “Quiet!” Charlie said. His voice rang out louder than he had intended, but still it didn’t stop Anastasia from moving forward. She had reached the entrance to the practice hall, marked FLIGHT SIMULATION. Taking up an entire corner of the building, the space was massive, like a warehouse or an auditorium, big enough to contain twenty tables set up in five rows of four each. On the center of each table was a stack of white paper and five yellow wooden pencils. Most of the tables had already been claimed by various teams; Charlie could see the matching green backpacks of Worth Hooks down toward the far end of the room, and quickly picked out Richard Caldwell all the way near the front—right near the cordoned-off area where the competition would take place. Behind another velvet rope, similar to the one guarding the 747, Charlie saw a long stretch of polished-cement floor, marked off foot by foot. Although it was only a dozen yards wide, it had to be at least two hundred feet long—the length of two basketball courts, end to end.

  “We’re over here,” Anastasia said, pointing to one of the few empty tables closest to the entrance. “There’s enough paper to make as many airplanes as you need. Since this is a test run, you don’t have to beat anyone, but there’s certainly a psychological component to a game like this. You want to scare the other teams a little bit, make them question their own designs—”

  “Wait,” Charlie interrupted again, finally stopping Anastasia before she led them through the entrance. “What do you mean? How have all these other teams competed before?”

  She turned back toward him. Her eyes were hidden behind those sunglasses.

  “Didn’t I tell you? All these other teams won their way into this competition in regional trials. It’s a requirement on the entry forms.”

  Charlie felt something cold rising in his chest.

  “If it’s a requirement, then how are we here?”

  There was a hint of a smile on Anastasia’s thin lips.

  “We faked your entry forms, of course.”

  With that, she turned and headed into the hall. Charlie stared at her, then quickly followed.

  “You lied on the entry forms? And you didn’t tell us?”

  “Didn’t have a choice,” she said simply. “There was no time to get you into a regional challenge, and no way to ensure that you’d win a regional, anyway. So we doctored a few forms to make it look like your team won a local Newton/Brookline competition, and edged out two other nonexisting teams to win in a suburban-Boston regional. Our forms were good enough not to raise any red flags with the contest’s governing committee; there are so many regions involved in the game, it was easy to slip one more onto the list. As far as the other teams believe, you’re here because you won your way here.”

  As Charlie stared at her, she continued:

  “Charlie, what we’re doing is important. We had to do whatever was necessary to get you here.”

  She placed a hand on the small of his back and gave him a little shove toward the empty table. Before he could say anything, she was moving away, leaving his team alone with the stack of paper, the pencils, and the workbooks. Charlie was about to chase after her when Crystal leaned close to his ear.

  “If we’re going to have any chance at all here, we need to get to work.”

  “But you heard what she said, right?”

  Crystal shrugged.

  “There’s not much we can do about it now. However she got us into the competition, we’re here. And we don’t want to embarrass ourselves, do we?”

  Charlie’s gaze shifted toward the far side of the room, where he’d spotted the Worth Hooks backpacks. He couldn’t see Kelly from that distance, but he could imagine her bouncing ponytail. Crystal was
right, of course. He would have to push away his concerns about Anastasia and the lies she had told to get them into the competition, at least for the moment.

  He turned toward the stack of paper and started reaching for sheets. Then he noticed that Kentaro and Marion were already way ahead of him. The two of them were working together on a single sheet—Kentaro folding with his little, agile fingers while Marion read to him from a page in his sketchbook.

  “You guys are really making a seven forty-seven?” Jeremy asked, coming around the other side of the table.

  Kentaro had already folded the single page directly down the center. He carefully added two triangles from the tips.

  “A seven forty-seven made out of paper would fly about as far as this building moves every time there’s a light breeze. Simple aerodynamics, Jeremy. Or have you forgotten Professor Charlie’s fabulous lecture?” said Kentaro.

  Charlie blushed, but inside he was pleased that at least Kentaro had been listening. The “lecture” had taken place the night before, after they’d all brushed their teeth and readied themselves for bed. Charlie had decided the moment had been ripe to distill everything he had read, watched, and learned about flight in the preceding week since Anastasia had invited him to join the competition.

  Simple aerodynamics. Kentaro was correct; that was the basic science behind all flight—not just paper airplanes, but big real ones, rocket ships, and even birds. Charlie remembered the way he had launched into his lecture, standing on one of the queen-size beds, his arm out at his side. He’d first held his hand out with his palm perpendicular to the ground, his thumb up in the air. Then he’d waved his arm back and forth like he was halfway into a loud clap. “All of you, give it a try,” he’d said. Soon they had all been waving their arms like maniacs. “Feel the way the air pushes against your hand?” Then he’d turned his hand to the side, parallel to the floor, and the rest of the Whiz Kids had followed suit. “Now see how much easier it is to slide your arm through the air? Like slicing through warm butter. That, my friends, is aerodynamics at work.”