Charlie Numbers and the Man in the Moon

by Ben Mezrich

  “Fifty-nine seconds,” he gasped, reading what the Wright brothers had achieved. “Eight hundred and fifty-two feet.”

  It was another minute before Jeremy and Crystal reached him, and crumpled to the sand. Jeremy’s long body looked like a giant Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish that had floated up from the beach. Crystal had her glasses off, wiping sweat from her brow.

  “What the heck was that?” she huffed. “Have you gone completely mental on us? You know you’re not an airplane, right?”

  Charlie grinned.

  “It’s the materials, Crystal.”

  She looked at him.

  “We can’t change our materials. The rules limit us to paper. Twenty-pound letter size, to be exact.”

  “That’s right. We’re limited to paper. But that doesn’t mean we can’t change the materials.”

  “He has gone mental,” Jeremy said.

  “No, listen. There is a way to change the materials. By changing the way we fold the paper. If we can simulate a lighter paper in certain areas like the wings, and simulate heavier paper in the nose area, by using strategic folds, we can pull this off.”

  Crystal slowly put her glasses back on her face. Then a smile crept across her lips. She, better than anyone, understood how different materials exhibited different properties. Different types of rocks had different densities, different levels of porousness, different reactions to heat. Sandstone could be smelted into glass, carbon could be crushed into diamond. And just maybe, paper could be folded into something approximating spruce or pine.

  Slowly the three of them headed back toward the visitor center. As Charlie had suspected, they found Marion and Kentaro exiting the gift shop. Porter stood near the entrance of the store cleaning his sunglasses with a silky black cloth. Anastasia motioned for the kids to return to the bus. Kentaro waved a small silver-and-gray model airplane in the air, the words KITTY HAWK 1903 inked across the fuselage.

  “What’s that for?” Charlie asked.

  “Well, I figure one way or another we go home with an airplane-shaped trophy.”

  Charlie grinned as Kentaro stuck the model airplane into his neon backpack.

  He felt certain now: One way or another, they sure were going to go home with that trophy.

  11

  “ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-THREE. One hundred and eighty-four. One hundred and eighty-five! A new record!”

  Charlie watched the opposing team’s Flying Fox design touch down next to the distance marker with a sinking feeling in his stomach, as the crowd around him erupted in applause. Maybe letting the other team throw first had been a mistake; a throw like that was going to be almost impossible to beat, and it suddenly felt like the Whiz Kids’ remarkable day was finally heading toward a disappointing end.

  Charlie tried to ignore the continuing applause aimed at the opposing team—a group of girls from Ms. Fine Parker Academy in Jacksonville, Florida—as he approached the starting line. Eight hours into the day of competition, the crowd had been whittled down from over a hundred kids to fewer than forty; only eight teams remained, and the winner of each of these trials was going to be on their way to the semifinals. The fact that Charlie’s team had made it this far had stunned the crowd—most of all Anastasia and Porter, who were standing at the back of the room. Anastasia had actually even smiled a few times, though Charlie still hadn’t seen any evidence that Porter’s face had the ability to show emotion.

  But all of that seemed like it was about to come to an ignoble end. The lessons Charlie and his team had learned at Kitty Hawk had enabled them to create planes that had gone over a hundred feet—four times in six hours, actually, but they’d never gotten anywhere near 185. The Flying Fox was an amazing design—hefty at the front, but with long wings and drag-reducing “ears” that gave it its name. The girl who had made the throw, almost a head taller than Charlie, with long brown pigtails and denim overalls, was too busy celebrating with her teammates to even notice Charlie as he took his place next to her at the starting line. Unlike the practice sessions, in the real competition the contestants took turns throwing, which seemed fortuitous at the moment. Judging from his last few throws, his plane would have been eating the Flying Fox’s exhaust.

  One hundred and eighty-five: only forty-two feet shy of the Guinness World Record flight set back in 2012 by John M. Collins and Joe Ayoob. Collins was an aircraft designer who had perfected a sleek paper airplane design, and then had called in Ayoob, a former California-Berkeley quarterback, to make the throw. Ayoob had thrown the plane so hard during practice runs, it had almost shredded in the air, but eventually he made the record-winning distance.

  As Charlie stood at the starting line, raising his twiglike right arm, his team’s so-far-unbeaten design held gently in his fingers, he knew there was no chance of anything being shredded today. He didn’t have a quarterback’s arm strength; he barely had the arm strength of a sixth grader. His plane’s thrust would be limited to whatever his feeble muscles could muster, amplified by the torque of a hopefully perfect throw.

  At least the plane in his fingers was something of a work of art. Artistically designed by Marion, mathematically calculated by himself with Jeremy’s help, folded by Kentaro, and measured and weighed by Crystal, it was truly the result of team effort. Charlie knew that the plane was as close to perfect as they could manage. Working off of his epiphany at Kitty Hawk, they’d used precise folds to mimic different materials in different parts of the plane. The nose was made heavy and thick, pine or even maple, made by tripling and quadrupling the paper toward the tip; the wings were long and light, balsa or spruce, just single sheets. The tail was almost as sharp as the front, but half its weight. They’d gone over the calculations in their room until three in the morning, and when they’d hit the competition, they’d proved their calculations from the very first flight.

  But now all of that seemed irrelevant. As the crowd finally quieted down behind him, Charlie stared down the long track; 185 feet was so far ahead of him, he couldn’t even make out the marker. Such a throw seemed impossible.

  “Come on, Charlie,” he heard from behind him. “You can do this.” Crystal and Jeremy were only a few feet away, Crystal leaning forward so her whisper could be heard over the low, expectant murmur from the crowd. “We’ve got the design down. Now it’s all about the math.”

  Charlie knew exactly what she meant. The plane was beautiful; now its flight was going to come down entirely to his release. And as much as a paper airplane throw seemed to be about muscle strength and athleticism, it was really about math. Angles and force, calculated as exactly as possible.

  Charlie had run the numbers himself. He knew that he needed to release the plane at a thirty-six-degree angle to the ground to allow the plane’s design to best overcome the force of gravity and reach the optimum flying height. He had to use the circular spin of his arm with just the right amount of centrifugal force needed to overcome enough drag to keep the plane aloft long enough for it to complete a parabolic arc.

  Charlie took a deep breath, trying to steady his hand. He looked down the long track one more time—and in the edge of his vision caught sight of Kelly, standing with her team right past the ten-foot marker. She nodded at him, her blond ponytail bobbing with the motion. She believed in him. He just needed to believe in himself.

  Math. Numbers. This was his world.

  He drew his arm back as far as he could, then whirled it forward, fast as a snapping rubber band. He released at the tip of the arc, as close to thirty-six degrees as he could manage. Then he closed his eyes.

  For the first few seconds he heard nothing; the crowd had gone dead quiet, the room frozen like Massachusetts in February. Then he began to hear surprised whispers, followed by outright gasps.

  He opened his eyes. The plane was still in the air, still rising. But it was moving slowly—so incredibly slowly, it almost seemed like a special effect. The other kids had never seen anything like it. The heaviness of the plane’s nose, the length of
its tail, the sharpness of its wings—the way they’d mimicked other materials with folds of paper—were combining to make the plane stay in the air well beyond what seemed possible.

  “Wow,” Crystal whispered from behind Charlie. “Look at it go.”

  Look at it go. The plane floated past the ninety-foot marker and kept on going, rising incrementally. At ninety-five, it seemed to level off, but it wasn’t until a hundred feet that it started to inch downward, beginning the descent portion of the parabola. My god, Charlie thought. It just might make it. It just might—

  And then something happened. Maybe it was a draft of air from a vent in the high ceilings, maybe it was some infinitesimal dust particles floating through the vast hall, but the plane’s descent began to accelerate. The nose dipped slightly downward, and then the plane was descending faster and faster.

  “Oh no,” someone in the crowd gasped. “It’s going down!”

  Charlie’s eyes widened. He couldn’t believe it was happening. They had gotten so close. He watched as the plane slid lower and lower in the air. Then he looked at the markers below. A hundred and ten feet. A hundred and fifteen. A hundred and twenty.

  “I can’t watch,” Jeremy hissed from next to Crystal. “I can’t—”

  “Wait,” Crystal said. “Look!”

  Charlie raised his eyes back to the plane—and was shocked to see it had somehow leveled off. The long wings had stabilized in the air, and the tip was now horizontal with the floor. The plane was a bare five feet off the floor, but it was still going forward! It passed the 150 marker and kept on going. Straight as an arrow. Cutting through the air, still in slow motion, but ever forward.

  One sixty. One sixty-five. One seventy. One seventy-five.

  And finally, it started going downward again, but this time slowly, gently. As if there was a tiny pilot inside, aiming for a perfect, soft landing.

  “One eighty-five,” the crowd yelled. “One eighty-six. One eighty-seven. One eighty-eight!!”

  The plane touched down and skidded to a stop. There was a brief pause. Then the crowd erupted again, even louder than before. Charlie felt hands patting his shoulders, and he turned and hugged Crystal, then Jeremy. He could see Kentaro and Marion leaping up and down at their table, Kentaro’s head barely visible at the peak of each excited jump.

  Charlie released Crystal and Jeremy, and took a step back. He found himself searching the crowd for Kelly but didn’t see her. He was about to head back to their table when he felt another hand on his shoulder. He expected Jeremy, but to his surprise, he found himself facing Richard Caldwell. Caldwell smiled and gave Charlie’s shoulder a warm pat.

  “Fantastic,” Caldwell said. “You definitely deserve the award for most improved. A hundred and eighty-eight feet, that’s a new track record. Last year I won with a hundred and eighty-four.”

  Charlie didn’t know what to say. He would have expected jealousy, or at least some competitive edginess, but Caldwell seemed completely sincere. Charlie finally managed an embarrassed shrug.

  “We got lucky, I think. Maybe there was a breeze helping us along.”

  “You got good, not lucky. You left here in last place, came back in first. Tomorrow, there are just four teams left. You guys. The bunch from Worth Hooks. A team from a prep school in Dallas. And my team.”

  Caldwell tilted his head toward a group of four boys watching from two tables away. “Which means I’ll be seeing you at the dinner tonight, right?”

  “Dinner?”

  “It’s a tradition we started when we won two years ago. My father’s company, Aerospace Infinity, hosts the dinner at my family’s house. AI cosponsors the competition as well, and puts up the cash prize.”

  “Your father has an aerospace company?”

  Caldwell smiled. “Being an astronaut is cool, but you can’t do it forever. He’s been in the aerospace business for years now. The company is mostly into developing new materials for spaceflight, like new metals for heat shields on rockets and new types of glass for the windows on the International Space Station. That sort of thing.”

  “That’s so neat,” Charlie said. Then he had a thought. “Your father hosts the semifinalists dinner. What if you didn’t make it?”

  Caldwell shrugged.

  “I guess we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. Like I told you before, my dad is pretty hard-core; he expects a lot from me. You should have heard his lecture when I once brought home a B in second-grade math.”

  Charlie whistled. He felt bad for Caldwell, although he doubted Caldwell had gotten many Bs in his lifetime.

  “Well, thanks for the invite; we’ll definitely be there.”

  Caldwell nodded, then returned to his own team. Charlie headed toward his friends, holding an invitation out in front of him.

  “Crystal, get your party shoes ready.”

  Before he could reach them, Anastasia stepped between him and the rest of the Whiz Kids. In a swift, sudden motion, she took the invite out of his hand.

  “Not so fast. I’ve got another invitation for the five of you before the dinner.”

  “This afternoon?” Charlie said. “I figured we needed to practice some more, for the semis and finals.”

  Both events were scheduled for tomorrow—the semis in the morning, the finals in the afternoon. Charlie’s team had done amazingly well. As Caldwell had said, they currently held the record for the best flight in tournament history. But Charlie had only been half joking when he’d told Caldwell it was probably luck. He himself still had no idea how he’d gotten the plane to go so far.

  “Practice is important,” Anastasia said. “But you’ve shown me today, as I’d hoped all along, you have the skill and the innate abilities. There’s really only one thing I think you might be missing.”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows. Jeremy moved next to him, gesturing toward Caldwell’s crew. “Better haircuts?”

  Anastasia didn’t smile. Her expression remained unreadable behind her sunglasses.

  “Motivation,” she said simply, as she slid the invitation into the pocket of her tailored jacket.

  12

  EYES CLOSED, IT WAS just a lot of paper. Stacks of hand-size paper, piled across a two-foot-by-three-foot pallet, sealed together by strips of cellophane. Barely an inch tall in most places, smelling vaguely of damp moss. Just a whole lot of paper—about ten pounds, if Charlie had to guess, heavy enough to make his arms quiver as he tried not to drop the darn thing.

  But when he finally opened his eyes, to multiple flashes from Kentaro’s disposable camera—heck, who even knew where to find a disposable camera anymore—it almost took Charlie by surprise to see the green faces staring up at him from beneath the cellophane. Eyes open, it wasn’t just paper. It was stack after stack of twenty-dollar bills.

  A quarter of a million dollars in twenties, to be precise, more than Charlie had ever seen in one place in his lifetime. A true fortune. Awed by what he was holding, Charlie struggled against the weight of the pallet; luckily Crystal stepped in at the last minute to keep the thing from tumbling to the floor. Over her head, Charlie could see Marion and Kentaro sitting next to each other cross-legged on the floor, both of them laughing at him as Kentaro continued snapping photos. Jeremy would have probably poked fun at his pathetic, diminutive Tyrannosaurus rex–like arms, if he hadn’t been standing so close to the uniformed tour guide, who was still going over the history of the place with Anastasia. Anastasia, for her part, was still wearing her sunglasses, but at least she had left Mr. Porter waiting outside in the black SUV that had transported them all there from the Watergate.

  “I think we get the idea,” Crystal said loudly toward the guide, while helping Charlie put the pallet of twenties back on the display table at the center of the room. “A quarter million dollars is heavier than it looks.”

  The guide separated himself from Jeremy and Anastasia, then gestured for the group to head back out into the floral-carpeted hallway that led deeper into the high-ceilinged facility.
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  Charlie followed his team out of the room, wondering to himself what it would be like to work in a factory were you literally printed money every day. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing might not have been on most people’s lists of things to do in Washington, DC, but Charlie had found the place fascinating from the moment Anastasia had led them through the front entrance and past the multiple metal detectors and security posts that guarded the interior of the plant. Charlie wasn’t certain why Anastasia had brought them there during a few hours that the competition had set aside that afternoon for sightseeing; Charlie could think of a half dozen other places in the nation’s capital that might have made more sense, from a tourist’s point of view. But Anastasia had made it clear on the trip over that right now they were anything but tourists.

  Now that they were deep on the inside, traveling through a wide, column-lined hallway with canted metal ceilings resembling the arched framework of an airplane hanger, Charlie felt like they were descending into a secret, underground world. The fluorescent bulbs dangling above his head reminded him of some sort of World War II bunker, though he guessed the fixtures, along with the flowery carpeting below his feet, were more likely the product of a 1970s makeover of the tourist-approved sections of the factory. But even so, as they moved past doors leading to the printing presses themselves, where sheet after sheet of bills of every denomination sped across conveyer belts and curled around giant spools to be inked, pressed, sliced, and eventually put into circulation, Charlie got the sense that in here, time moved a little differently than in the outside world. The men and women who worked in this plant, surrounded by a potential fortune measured in the billions and trillions, had to be a special breed.

  Charlie watched the guide as he led them out of the hallway and into a circular room at the dead center of the E-shaped facility, and wondered, did the man ever feel tempted to try to take his work home with him? Print up a few extra sheets of hundreds for himself?