Charlie Numbers and the Man in the Moon

by Ben Mezrich

  From there, he’d launched into a discussion of the principles behind his actions—how the perpendicular facing of his hand had increased the drag, or resistance, by forcing the air against his flat palm. For a plane to fly properly for a long distance, you had to find a way to shape it so it decreased the drag as much as possible. And then you needed to take into account the force of gravity—the inexorable pull downward—through the principles of thrust and lift. Thrust was the action of his muscles sending his arm forward, lift was the way his horizontal palm made the air push upward against his skin. Four scientific forces working together to keep his hand moving forward. Four scientific forces that would work together to keep any object in the air—a bird, a spaceship, a jumbo jet, a paper airplane.

  “Four forces in balance,” Kentaro said, folding the tip of the paper down and creasing the top. “Resistance, gravity, lift, thrust. The goal is to focus a little more on the lift—if it glides more slowly, it will travel farther. Simple physics.”

  He brought the sides in symmetrically, and after a few more folds, his plane was complete. He held it high in the air. It was mostly rectangular, with a flat nose and a squarish body. It wasn’t pretty or sleek, nothing like the elegant, perfect plane Caldwell had flown over the Reflecting Pool, or the long, thin plane Ryan had tossed through the train car. In fact, it wasn’t something you would think could fly more than a few feet.

  “This morning, while you guys were fighting over the shower, I watched a kid make this one on a Japanese website. I don’t think people will understand the Japanese name so let’s just call it the Nagassack Ninja.”

  He handed the plane to Charlie. It felt a little front heavy, a little short in the wings. But Kentaro looked confident.

  “That’s what you’ve come up with? Looks like a milk carton with wings. It’s going to be too easy for the other team to beat us,” said Charlie.

  “Give it a nice smooth throw and you’ll see. It packs a heck of a punch.”

  Kentaro pointed to the testing area. Kids were already lining up in two rows to try out their various planes against each other, team versus team. Charlie decided it wouldn’t hurt to give Kentaro’s plane a chance. After all, they didn’t really have anything better to work with.

  He moved past the row of tables and took his position at the end of one of the lines. Kentaro and Jeremy came with him; Marion and Crystal remained behind at the table, folding more sheets of paper and checking out the various sketches in Marion’s drawing pad. As Charlie waited for the line to move forward, he surveyed the planes in front of him and in the line across from him. So many variations, so many different folding styles. He knew they were all working with the same four scientific principles—resistance, gravity, thrust, lift—but there seemed to be so many different ways to attack the problem. This wasn’t like math at all, where usually there was one right answer. There seemed to be hundreds of right answers, and just as many that could very well be wrong. Charlie looked down at Kentaro’s Nagassack Ninja.

  “I don’t know, Kentaro. I just don’t know,” Charlie said. Then he raised his eyes to see Ryan standing in the line directly across from him. Apparently, the big redhead had pushed his way ahead of a dozen other kids to make sure he’d be competing directly with Charlie in the test run. Some of the other kids looked like they wanted to complain, but since Ryan stood a head taller than all of them, they offered up nothing but angry looks.

  “It’s just a trial run,” Jeremy said. “We’ve got something much better in store for the real competition.”

  Kentaro kicked at Jeremy’s shin, but Jeremy ignored the little neon sneaker, giving Charlie a last push forward to the test area starting line. The next thing Charlie knew, he was standing side by side with Ryan, a crowd of kids on either side of them counting down.

  “Three . . . two . . . one!”

  Charlie hooked his arm back and threw, trying to keep his hand as steady and smooth as possible. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Ryan heaving his own plane forward, his longer arm offering so much more strength and thrust, and then the two competing planes were off, flying directly down the test track.

  Ryan’s plane—almost twice as long as the Ninja, tapered to a fine, sharp point—took off faster, slicing through the air like a horizontal rocket. But Charlie was pleased to see the Ninja was at least flying straight, rising slightly upward as it slowly drifted down the long lane, passing over the distance markers one after another.

  “Look at it go!” Kentaro yelled. “Make Daddy proud, little Ninja!”

  “Little ninja?” Ryan shouted back. “There’s nothing little about that pig. Talk about a flying boat.”

  Charlie ignored Ryan’s taunts, focused on the two planes as they continued down the track. Ryan’s was way ahead now, but it was starting to descend, ever so slightly. Another minute and it was going to touch down. The Ninja was way behind, but going strong, still rising ever so slightly. For a moment Charlie really believed they had a shot at winning. . . .

  And then the Ninja started to wobble in the air. Almost imperceptibly at first, then harder, until it was trembling like a dog coming inside after a cold rain.

  “Uh-oh, Daddy,” Ryan said. “Your little ninja is having an epileptic fit.”

  “What’s happening?” Jeremy asked.

  “It’s gotten too slow,” Charlie said. “The forces are out of balance. Gravity overcoming thrust, and now it’s giving in to the drag. Down it goes.”

  And down it went. Straight down, down, down, hitting the ground nose-first. Someone nearby shouted out a number—thirty-seven—the distance in feet. Thirty-seven feet. Pretty good for a first try, but nowhere near a competitive distance, from what Charlie had seen so far. Another ten seconds went by, and then Ryan’s plane finally drifted down out of the air.

  “Eighty-nine!” someone shouted. Ryan grimaced.

  “Not my best showing. Anything under a hundred gets the shredder.”

  Then he turned to face Charlie, a cruel smile on his lips.

  “Don’t know what the heck Kelly sees in you bozos. The scent of loser coming off you is enough to make me puke.”

  He gave Charlie a thumbs-down and headed back toward where the other Worth Hooks kids were waiting, clapping their hands at his easy win. Charlie caught sight of Kelly in the group of green backpacks, but she avoided his gaze. Charlie turned and headed back toward his team’s table. Anastasia was waiting for him, standing stiffly between Crystal and Marion, who were busily folding more paper airplanes.

  “I wouldn’t call that an auspicious start, would you, Charlie?”

  “It’s not like we had a fair chance,” Charlie responded, more angry than he wanted to be. “We’re brand-new to this. Everyone else here has won contests before; everyone here knows how to fold a darn paper airplane.”

  Crystal and Marion looked up from their planes. Jeremy and Kentaro had gone still behind Charlie, watching him. Anastasia waited a full beat before lowering her sunglasses to show her green eyes.

  “I chose you because you’re supposed to be special, Charlie. You’re as smart as any kid here—smarter than most. So maybe you’re starting a few feet behind the line; you’re supposed to be smart enough to make up the difference.”

  She turned and headed toward the door, where Charlie saw the menacingly large shape of Mr. Porter. He waited until she was gone from sight before turning back to his friends. Crystal and Marion had gone back to their folding, and Jeremy and Kentaro were watching other teams taking turns at the testing track. Nobody was saying anything, but Charlie knew what they were all thinking.

  Everyone had been telling Charlie he was a genius for as long as he could remember, but for the first time in a long, long while, he didn’t feel all that smart. Kentaro’s Nagassack Ninja had flown okay, but it was nowhere near good enough to compete with the other planes in the competition.

  Maybe Charlie had been wrong when he’d first surveyed the exhibits in the great hall of the Air and Space Museum.
Maybe starting at the finish line was the wrong approach.

  These other teams had all competed before. They were already ready to make Apollo capsules and head for the moon. But Charlie’s team was starting from scratch. From less than scratch. As Anastasia had said, they weren’t even at the starting line yet. They weren’t the Apollo space project; they weren’t astronauts.

  They were Wilbur and Orville Wright. And if they were going to have any chance in this competition, they needed to go back to the very beginning.

  10

  “I CAN SEE WHY they chose this place,” Kentaro squealed, his face inches from a rattling square of glass overlooking a stretch of sand that ran horizontal to the asphalt parking lot. “This wind gets any stronger, this bus is going to be airborne too!”

  “From flying boats to flying buses,” Jeremy chimed in from the seat ahead of Kentaro. “If we can just work our way to planes, we’ll be in business.”

  Charlie ignored Jeremy’s facetious comment. Kentaro had it right, he thought, looking out the window from his own seat, halfway down the near empty bus they’d been trapped inside for the long five-and-a-half-hour trip from Washington, DC, to Kitty Hawk.

  They had chosen the famous location from the list of possible field trips that each team had been given when they’d checked in to the competition. Charlie could tell by the sparseness of the bus that they were the only team that had picked what had to be the farthest excursion, distance-wise, but he didn’t care: He could see firsthand many of the reasons Orville and Wilbur Wright had made the choice of the Atlantic-beachfront testing ground for their first attempts at heavier-than-air flight. The frequent, gusty winds. The fact that the nearby North Carolina town had been home to less than sixty families back in 1900, when the Wright brothers had practiced their craft. And maybe most important, nearby small, rolling hills and soft sands for when something, inevitably, went wrong.

  The bus pulled to a creaking stop at the edge of the parking lot, and Anastasia signaled the kids to file out. Mr. Porter stared down at the kids menacingly as they walked past him. Charlie wasn’t sure if that was his intention, or if it simply had to do with the way his eyebrows were shaped. Charlie followed Jeremy, Kentaro, Crystal, and Marion outside. There were only three other tourists.

  “Feel that Atlantic Ocean breeze,” Crystal said, once they’d all made it off the bus and were strolling past the Wright Brothers National Memorial Visitor Center.

  “We don’t have much time here, so let’s be efficient about this excursion,” Anastasia said. Porter nodded in agreement.

  Charlie shielded his eyes as he surveyed the area: sunlight streaming around the Wright Monument at the top of Big Kill Devil Hill flashed like the beam of a lighthouse. Past the monument, there was just a long, rolling swath of sand and hills. He watched as a single seagull flapped past, wings fighting against the breeze, a vision of feather and beak circumnavigating the monument in an elegant arc.

  “Hard to imagine,” he said, “but when the Wright brothers set up shop here, flight was something reserved for birds.”

  It was a compelling moment, standing in that historical spot. During the bus ride, they’d had a lot of time to go over the Wright brothers’ journey to a working plane, reading from a trio of books Crystal had downloaded from the Internet onto her phone. From 1900 to 1903, the brothers had tried many iterations of their glider design, finally ending up with the Wright Flyer, which would become their first manned vessel. It wasn’t until December 14, 1903, that—after winning a coin toss to determine who would fly first—Wilbur had set out in the entirely spruce-built plane. He’d taken off from a launching rail they had crafted running down one of the nearby hills—the ominously named Big Kill Devil Hill—for a gravity-assisted takeoff. That plane had left the rail but had only remained airborne for a matter of seconds, crashing to the sand and suffering minor damage. Three days later, on December 17, 1903, it had been Orville’s turn. With wind speeds well over twenty miles per hour, the conditions had been even more perfect—and his first flight had lasted twelve seconds, his plane flying 120 feet.

  From there, the Wright brothers had continued to take turns, flying a total of four times. Wilbur’s last flight had clocked in at 852 feet, staying aloft for fifty-nine seconds. The front elevator supports had been damaged upon that last landing, and seconds after Wilbur had gotten off the thing, a strong wind had tossed the Flyer across the sand like a toy, damaging it beyond repair.

  After passing the monument and the seagull, the Whiz Kids crossed in front of the reconstructed hangar and original workshop of the brothers. Anastasia and Porter followed behind them. The place was quiet—only a handful more tourists than the trio that had accompanied them on the bus—which made sense, since it was the middle of the day in the middle of the week. Normally, Charlie and his friends would have been in school, lodged somewhere between sixth-period science and seventh-period social studies. Charlie would have been contemplating the jog between classes through the long Nagassack hallways, using the banks of lockers as natural obstructions as he tried to avoid Dylan Wigglesworth and his coterie of thugs.

  Even the thought of Dylan, his hometown tormenter, gave Charlie a little burst of adrenaline, and he hurried his step as he passed the hangar. And caught sight of a huge, five-foot-tall boulder supporting an enormous bronze plaque.

  “There it is,” he said excitedly. “The First Flight Boulder. Over a hundred years ago, this was the very spot where the Flyer lifted off.”

  Charlie’s pulse was rocketing as he reached the bronze plaque and ran his fingers over the raised letters that told the story of that famous first flight. As the rest of his friends reached the boulder, Charlie turned and looked down the long, grated pathway that stretched out ahead of him along the sandy bluff, running the entire distance of the Flyer’s first flights. He could see other boulders set along the pathway, marking the Wright brothers’ earlier attempts, each engraved with details indicating the progress from design to implementation.

  Charlie paused, letting his mind go blank, as the ocean breeze pulled at his clothes. This was where it had all started. This was the place he had come for answers, and he really believed those answers were somehow hidden in that long stretch of sand.

  Before he truly knew what he was doing, he stretched his arms out at his sides like airplane wings. Then he took off down the grated path, quickly accelerating to a full run. Jeremy shouted something behind him, but he was moving too fast now, the air whizzing past his ears. Faster, faster, faster, his chest heaving, his legs pumping, his feet slamming against the grates. The next marker grew bigger and bigger, closer and closer—and then finally he reached the four-foot-high stone. He skidded to a stop, breathing hard, and just as before ran his fingers along the engraved words.

  END OF 1ST FLIGHT

  TIME: 12 SECONDS

  DISTANCE: 120 FT

  DEC. 17, 1903

  PILOT: ORVILLE

  “Charlie!” Jeremy shouted.

  Charlie looked back and saw that Jeremy and Crystal were now running the same path behind him, their arms straight out at their sides. Anastasia and Porter looked like tiny specks in the distance. Kentaro and Marion had hung behind too, most likely heading to the gift shop: Kentaro had a thing for cheap tchotchkes. Looking at Jeremy and Crystal and the way they moved was a lesson in itself; their bodies were so different—Jeremy’s long arms and legs spindly like half-cooked spaghetti, Crystal more compact and sure of herself, every now and then using one of her wings to make sure her glasses didn’t get blown off her face. Two very different designs, flying the same path, at nearly the same speed.

  Four forces in balance in very different ways. The thrust of their churning legs, the drag of the wind against their bodies. Gravity pulling them both against the grated pathway, lift provided by their outstretched arms.

  “We can do this,” Charlie whispered to himself.

  And then he turned and started forward again, heading for the second stone marker. Ar
ms still out, he was transported 114 years back in time. He was the Wright Flyer zipping through the air, just a few yards over the sand, moving faster and farther than any heavier-than-air object built by man before. We can do this.

  The Wright Flyer was made of spruce wood, with an engine. All they had to work with was paper. But maybe that’s the key. Charlie closed on the second marker. He yelled back over his shoulder to Jeremy and Crystal, who were still behind him.

  “Twelve seconds, one hundred and seventy-five feet!”

  He ignored the spots that were starting to float in his vision as his lungs burned from the effort. The third marker came up even faster.

  “Fifteen seconds, two hundred feet! I’m going all the way!”

  Crystal and Jeremy kept running after him. They were a dozen yards behind, chugging along. Charlie wasn’t faster than either of them, but at the moment, he was like a man possessed. His outstretched arms glided through the air, as thin as he could make them to cut down on the drag and add to the lift. His legs pumped and pumped, thrust against gravity.

  Finally, he could make out the fourth marker in the distance. Closer and closer and closer. His mind was really gone now, whirling back in time. It had taken the Wright brothers four flights to find the right synergy between the four forces. They had used a metal rail as a guide, had gotten the wings and weight and angle just right. And then they had experimented with materials, ending up with mostly spruce. Then, after their success, they shifted to an even more stable and more malleable wood, white pine. That was the key. Not just the four forces, but the material.

  Charlie skidded to a heaving stop next to the final stone marker.