Charlie Numbers and the Man in the Moon

by Ben Mezrich

  “We’ve got to move,” he said. “If we’re lucky, we can get these to the proper authorities, and they can sort it all out.”

  Crystal nodded. Together, they rushed back to the stairs leading into the museum. Charlie took the stairs two at a time, Crystal nearly bumping into his heels. He was careful as he reached the top, pulling himself out of the opening with his head bowed low so as not to bump against the bottom of the Boeing 747 engine. Then he turned around to help Crystal after him.

  It wasn’t until they’d crawled out from under the engine, the slab of carpet sliding shut behind them, that Charlie realized they weren’t alone.

  High leather boots. Black leggings. A gray sheath dress. Wide, reflective sunglasses.

  Anastasia was standing in front of them, a smile on her thin lips. Porter was next to her, his crew cut as sharp and close as ever. A second man was behind Porter, with a similar crew cut, and even more muscles bulging beneath his tight black T-shirt. Anastasia stepped forward, holding out a manicured hand.

  “Hello, Charlie,” she said through her tight grin. “I think you have something for me. The sooner you hand it over, the sooner we can put all of this behind us.”

  Charlie involuntarily stepped back, nearly knocking Crystal into the jet engine.

  “Charlie,” Anastasia said, “we can do this the easy way.”

  She smiled even wider, gesturing to Porter, who had taken a step forward.

  “Or we can do this Mr. Porter’s way.”

  18

  CHARLIE FELT HIS ENTIRE body begin to tremble. He could feel the weight of his backpack against his shoulder. He knew he had no choice. Porter was huge, the man behind him even bigger—but he didn’t want to hand over the backpack. He looked past Anastasia. The closest tourists were a good ten yards away. Nobody was near enough to see what was going on, and everyone’s attention was pinned to that 747, which took up most of the room.

  “You tricked us,” Charlie said, playing for time. “You don’t care about the moon rocks. You wanted the new metal.”

  “They aren’t mutually exclusive. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, the metal is made from the moon rocks themselves. It’s going to be the key to building superlight airplanes and rockets, which will fly better and faster. And I wasn’t lying, Charlie. Hand it over without any fuss, and I’ll make sure you all get recommendations to NASA. This can be good for all of us.”

  “But mostly good for you,” Crystal said. Charlie noticed that her left hand had fallen down next to her side. Her fingers were inching toward her pocket. She was up to something, but he wasn’t sure what. “This isn’t about NASA. This is about money. Caldwell’s company used the rocks to make the metal, and now you want to steal it and reverse engineer it, then sell it yourself. You’re a liar and a thief.”

  Anastasia sighed.

  “You kids have a lot to learn. This isn’t thievery—it’s business. The American way.”

  She turned toward Porter. “Mr. Porter, I think we have to do this your way,” she started, when there was a shout from behind her.

  Charlie looked to see Kentaro, Marion, and Jeremy running toward them. Kentaro was in front, a huge smile on his face.

  “Charlie, you’re not going to believe what happened! The plane—”

  Kentaro stopped midsentence, skidding on his heels as he saw Anastasia and her thugs. Jeremy and Marion nearly crashed into him from behind.

  A moment of worry crossed Anastasia’s face, but she quickly turned back toward Charlie.

  “Porter,” she shouted. “Get the backpack, now!”

  Porter started forward, and suddenly Crystal yanked something out of her pocket and threw it toward the floor. Charlie had less than a second to realize what it was. There was a sudden flash of bright light as the powder ignited, sparked by the kinetic energy of the breaking glass, and a huge orange flame leaped four feet into the air when the test tube full of lycopodium powder shattered against the ground.

  Anastasia fell backward, crashing into Porter. Porter and the other thug shielded their eyes, screaming like little kids. Charlie and Crystal leaped forward, dodging the flame, even as it burned itself out and disappeared in a puff of black smoke.

  “Scatter!” Charlie yelled.

  Crystal ran to the left, Jeremy and Marion toward the other side of the room. Charlie ran straight ahead, almost colliding with Kentaro. There was a brief moment as they tangled together and then quickly separated. Kentaro gave Charlie a strange look, but Charlie didn’t have time to contemplate what it meant. He hit the ground running, his legs moving as fast they could. He headed right through the crowd looking at the 747 nose, then burst through the door back into the hallway that led to the rest of museum. As he turned the first corner, he thought he might have just made it. Then he looked back, and his stomach dropped. Porter and the other crew cut crashed out through the doorway and into the hallway behind him, not ten feet behind.

  Charlie screamed inwardly and rocketed forward, heading straight for the main atrium.

  He couldn’t let Porter catch him. He needed to get those vials to the authorities—the police, NASA, whoever. He had to lose Porter and the other man somehow, but they were big and fast, and the looks on their faces emanated pure anger.

  Charlie reached the edge of the main atrium. The place was twice as crowded as the first time he’d gone through it—the sea of tourists around the Apollo capsule had to be ten thick—and Charlie knew he wasn’t going to get very far going straight through. Instead, he cut to his left and found himself in front of a stairwell leading up to the second-floor exhibits. Without a thought, he dove right on through—

  “Charlie? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

  Charlie nearly ran headlong into Richard Caldwell, coming down from upstairs. Charlie skidded to a stop. He knew he only had a few seconds until Porter figured out where he’d gone, and he had to make them count.

  “Richard, there’s something I need to tell you—”

  “And there’s something I need to tell you, man. Congratulations! What an amazing win. Your boy Kentaro broke the Guinness World Record. I don’t know how he did it, but he got that plane of yours to go two hundred and thirty feet! It nearly hit the back wall of the hall—”

  “Richard, listen to me!” Charlie didn’t have time to think about the amazing feat Kentaro had pulled off. “I’ve uncovered something about your father. His aerospace company is using stolen moon rocks to make a special metal, which they intend to market. He’s taken the rocks from NASA for his private company, and now Anastasia wants the metal—”

  “Hold on,” Richard interrupted, the smile fading from his face. “My father hasn’t stolen anything. And his aerospace company isn’t exactly a private company. It’s actually a new science outfit funded by the government. It’s intended to be a partner to NASA.”

  Realization hit Charlie. So that was why Aerospace Infinity had lab space beneath the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. It was funded by the US government. And Buzz Caldwell hadn’t stolen moon rocks from NASA, exactly. He was using them—perhaps without NASA’s knowledge—to develop a metal to be used by the American space agency.

  Even more of a reason why we can’t let Anastasia get her hands on this, Charlie thought.

  Then he heard shouting from behind him, and then heavy footsteps. They’re coming.

  He pushed past Richard and dove up the stairs.

  “I’ve got to go!” he shouted. “Get help!”

  He’d reached the top of the first set of stairs and turned into the second when he saw Porter and the other thug burst onto the bottom step. Richard gasped, flattening himself against the side of the stairwell as the two huge men pushed past. Charlie’s eyes went wide, and he leaped upward, taking two steps at a time. They were getting closer, closer—

  He flew onto the second-floor landing, nearly careening into the plaster wall directly across from him. He found his balance and continued to race forward. His eyes whirled past all the tourists, look
ing for an escape. So many exhibits—mechanical flying machines, space devices, a moon rover—and then ten yards ahead, something more mundane caught his gaze. A door imbedded in the wall, beneath bright red letters.

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  Charlie was holding a national secret in his backpack. That seemed good enough to earn him the status of “authorized personnel.”

  He was breathing hard as he pinballed across the floor as fast as he could, hitting the center of the door shoulder first. The door flung inward, and he found himself leaping up another set of steps. But as he reached the top, he realized he wasn’t heading to another floor of exhibits.

  He found himself stepping into the guts of the ceiling. If the inner workings of the museum were pristine, clean, well orchestrated, and organized, the dark space that spread out beneath the rounded top of the building was the exact opposite. There were cables and boxes of dusty tools and wires everywhere. It looked like a junkyard.

  Charlie skirted around an overturned box of tools when something caught his eye. Not a great weapon, exactly, but maybe something he could use: a pair of metal shears. He shoved them into his open backpack. Just as he took a few more steps forward, he heard a door slamming shut below and realized that Mr. Porter and his henchman had “authorized” themselves as well.

  He heard a heavy, low grumble. “Charlie, your time is running out. Here, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Where are you?”

  Charlie had never heard Mr. Porter’s voice before, and his entire body began to tremble. He picked his way forward as quietly as he could, moving around the boxes of equipment, and found himself at the edge of the metal catwalks that crisscrossed the high rounded ceiling of the main atrium. He looked down—a dizzying drop of at least fifty feet—to the atrium floor below. Then he looked directly across, through the open air of the atrium, and saw, with a start, that there was only one way out.

  It was rickety and held up by metal cables.

  19

  “KID, DON’T DO IT. Kid!”

  But Charlie was already reaching for the wire. The shears sliced through the snake of metal cable—and suddenly, Charlie was falling.

  Down.

  Down.

  Down.

  His stomach was in his mouth as the biplane plummeted, the nose dipping lower and lower. For a brief second Charlie thought he’d miscalculated, that those old wooden wings simply didn’t provide enough lift to overcome the force of gravity. But then, at the last second, the nose of the plane shifted upward, and he was gliding. Not horizontal, exactly, but forward, cutting through the air like a giant version of Kentaro’s paper airplane.

  Wind whizzed through Charlie’s hair as the biplane soared past Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Vega, hanging from similar metal wires attached to the ceiling beams. Then the plane began to jerk to the left. Charlie reached forward and grabbed what he thought was the elevator control—and the wooden stick snapped right off in his hands. He screamed. He was gliding without a stick. He grabbed the edge of the cockpit with both hands and raised himself so he could see over the nose, and saw the second-floor landing rapidly approaching. He could still make out Jeremy in the crowd, but now they were all looking in his direction, pointing and shouting. He could see the railing getting bigger and bigger, the second floor closer and closer.

  Charlie closed his eyes and began to pray. The plane continued to glide downward, nose aiming straight for that railing.

  Faster.

  Faster.

  Faster.

  The nose hit with a horrible sound of crashing wood and bending metal, and suddenly Charlie was thrown forward in the cockpit. He barely held on to the edge, his feet rising all the way into the air, and still the plane skidded forward. Tourists scattered in every direction, screaming. Then the plane came to a sudden stop. Charlie opened his eyes.

  He was still somehow in the cockpit, which was mostly intact, but the front of the plane had crumpled inward against the back wall of the landing. The wings to Charlie’s right and left looked dented but still okay. The tail behind him was hanging through a massive hole in the railing. A few feet back, and he’d have plummeted down to the bottom. He didn’t want to think about what that might have meant.

  Instead, he tried to catch his breath as he quickly freed himself from the cockpit. He reached back and could feel his knapsack still strapped to his shoulders. Then he leaped out of the plane and onto the carpet. A crowd of tourists now surrounded him. Then he saw Jeremy again, off to the side.

  He rushed toward his friend and didn’t notice the expression on Jeremy’s face until he was right up in front of him. Jeremy looked terrified. Then Charlie saw the manicured hand on Jeremy’s shoulder.

  Anastasia stepped out from behind Jeremy, reached forward, and grabbed Charlie’s backpack off his shoulder. Charlie tried to resist, but Anastasia was too strong.

  She pushed Charlie away and bent over the backpack, going to work on the zipper.

  Charlie felt Jeremy pulling him farther into the crowd.

  “We can’t leave her with it,” Charlie said, half mumbling to himself. “She can’t win—”

  “She’s not going to win,” Jeremy said.

  He pulled Charlie even farther back, and Charlie could hear footsteps behind him. He turned and saw Kentaro, Marion, and Crystal running toward him. Kentaro was holding his little neon backpack out in front of him, a huge smile on his tiny face.

  Charlie turned back toward Anastasia. She had gotten the zipper open, was digging inside the pack. Then her face changed. Her smile disappeared, the skin above her sunglasses wrinkled like a sun-dried grape.

  She ripped her arm out of the bag. In her hand was a silver-and-gray model airplane, the words KITTY HAWK 1903 inked across the fuselage.

  Anastasia looked up and saw Charlie and his friends, now twenty feet away, in the midst of a crowd of watching tourists. Her face turned bright red, and she took a menacing step toward them—

  When a strong arm grabbed her by her wrist.

  Standing behind her was Buzz Caldwell, tall and handsome and wearing a leather air force flight jacket, flanked by the three NASA officials who had been watching the paper plane competition. They’d traded their notebooks for shiny badges. Along with them were two Smithsonian security guards, and behind the guards, Richard Caldwell.

  As the NASA officials and security guards took Anastasia into custody, Richard found Charlie in the crowd and smiled at him. Then he gestured toward his father, and waved Charlie forward.

  Charlie swallowed. Crystal patted his shoulder.

  “I think you’re finally going to get to meet a real live astronaut.”

  20

  “IT WAS EVEN BETTER than I’d expected,” Charlie said as he stood in front of the Whiz Kids on the train platform, waving his hands as he spoke. “Like meeting the pope, if you were Catholic. Or meeting da Vinci, if you were Marion.”

  “Geez,” Crystal said, pulling a popsicle out of her mouth long enough to exhale. “Exaggerate much? It’s not like you met Stephen Hawking. Buzz Caldwell is pretty cool, but he’s just a guy who flies spaceships.”

  “A guy who makes spaceships now,” Jeremy corrected. “Isn’t that how this all started? He makes spaceships for one division of the government without another division of the government’s permission.”

  Charlie laughed. A day later, and Charlie was still trying to sort out exactly what they’d been caught up in—and how they’d managed to get through it all. Not just survive, but triumph. He could see the gold statue of that famous airplane bulging against the material of Jeremy’s backpack, sitting on the bench between Kentaro and Marion. Kentaro had first tried to shove the thing into his neon pack, but of course it hadn’t come close to fitting.

  Even so, Charlie would never make fun of Kentaro’s glowing accoutrement again. Kentaro’s quick thinking when they’d run into each other in the 747 room had saved the sample from Anastasia’s clutches. If Charlie had understood that look Kentaro had given him, maybe he w
ouldn’t have attempted his dangerous escape using the biplane. Then again, Porter would have had him, and who knew what that man was capable of. Charlie was glad the NASA officials had caught him and his henchman as well, after taking Anastasia into custody for her attempted corporate espionage.

  And besides, although Charlie had promised Crystal he wouldn’t try anything as stupid as that again, how many other sixth graders could say they had flown a hundred-year-old biplane across the Air and Space Museum?

  “Okay, he’s not Hawking, but he’s no slouch. And he wasn’t a thief; he was working for the government all along. And it was his word that cleared us from any trouble we might have been facing for the faked applications to the contest—or the damage we did getting away.”

  “The damage you did,” Marion reminded him. “You broke a hundred-year-old biplane.”

  “It’s being restored,” Crystal said. “Anastasia’s company is paying for it, with part of the fines they’ve been charged. And she won’t be bothering anyone for a long, long time. I think it was worth it.”

  “Worth it?” Kentaro exclaimed. “I’m going to be in the Guinness book of world records! We won the whole competition!”

  “About that,” Charlie said. “You never told me how you managed that.”

  Kentaro closed his eyes, pressing his hands together in a prayer pose. He’d been doing that since they’d fist arrived at the train station, whenever Charlie had asked him about the winning throw. At first, Charlie had let it slide, as Marion had occupied the conversation by giving them a short tour of the main part of the station: an incredible bit of architectural history, an amalgam of neoclassicism, with elements of gold leaf and granite, and grandiose features such as a six-hundred-foot-high outer facade, and ninety-six-foot-high inner ceilings.

  But now that they were down at the platform, waiting for the train that would take them back to Boston, Charlie wanted to know the truth.