by Ben Mezrich
Charlie looked from him to Sam, and she gave him a thumbs-up and an encouraging smile. Charlie took a deep breath and stepped past the two of them, then surveyed his competition. The ladder was exactly the same as the few he had tried before: two thick ropes leading about fifteen feet at a steep angle up the wall, bisected by a dozen or so wooden rungs. A foot above where the ladder reached the wall was the bell that Sam had rung so easily. Simple, Charlie said to himself, just take a deep breath and give it a go.
He reached for the second rung, gripping it tightly with his right hand. Then he put his left foot on the first rung, and lifted his weight up onto the ladder—
And that was as far as he got. The ladder lurched right, then left, then flipped upside down. His hands came open and he dropped, his stomach lurching as he plummeted the few feet to the floor. He hit with a huff of air, then realized, thankfully, that he’d landed on a thick blue gym mat. Nothing bruised but his ego. Greg and Sam peered down at him, laughing. Greg’s laugh was cruel and hearty and went on a lot longer than Sam’s.
“Pretty much what I expected,” he said. Sam gave Greg a push, then stepped forward and reached out a hand. Charlie took it, letting her help him back to his feet.
“I gotta say, I’m not sure how math or science is going to help me with this one. It just seems really hard to do.”
Sam laughed. Then she pulled Charlie next to her and turned him so he was facing the ladder with her, side by side. He was getting warm beneath his shirt but did his best to ignore the feeling.
“Charlie, tell me what you see.”
Charlie raised his eyebrows, wondering if it was some sort of trick question.
“I see a ladder.”
“And that’s exactly why you can’t do it. Because this one, well, it’s really a matter of perception.”
“What do you mean?”
Greg stuck his head over Charlie’s right shoulder.
“You see a ladder, genius, so you reach for the rungs. In the normal, physical world, that’s how a ladder works. And that’s exactly what the carnival thugs want you to do.”
“But see,” Sam said, leaning forward to grab one of the ropes that ran up the side of the rungs, “this isn’t a ladder at all, actually. Your brain is fooling you. This is just two ropes hanging up a wall. The rungs are irrelevant.”
Charlie looked at her and felt realization creeping in; he was starting to understand what she was saying. And if she was correct, well, he had been wrong—science was involved.
“The center of gravity—”
“Isn’t where you think it is,” Greg finished for him. “Your mind is telling you that this is a ladder, so the right place to put your hands and feet are on the rungs. But the real center of gravity is divided between the two outer ropes.”
Greg stepped forward, put his hands on the ropes, felt his way up a few feet, then carefully placed his feet where his hands had been.
“You never touch the rungs. You move both sides of your body as simultaneously as you can, and zoom, zoom, zoom.”
Smooth as silk, Greg skittered up the rope ladder, hands and feet working in tandem. Even though he was much bulkier than Sam and a head taller, his movements seemed just as graceful. Now that Charlie knew what he was doing, he could see how the older kid avoided creating torque—the physics term for twisting, or spinning, around a center—by evening his weight out across the real centers of gravity, the outer ropes. When Charlie had tried to do the ladder, he’d placed his weight right in the center because he’d thought that’s how a ladder was supposed to work, that’s where the center of gravity was. He had been wrong.
A matter of perception, and really, of physics. Torque versus gravity, a problem of Newtonian physics. Gravity was pulling your body down; by spreading your weight between the two ropes, you could avoid the torque that would normally spin you around the center, flipping you off to the floor.
It took a barely a few seconds for Greg to reach the bell. This time, the ringing seemed loud enough to shake the blacked-out windows. Then Greg was back down the rope and up on his feet, holding his palms out on either side like a magician completing a difficult trick. Charlie heard applause from behind, and turned to see Miranda standing behind him and Sam. It seemed, for the moment, that the lesson was over. Charlie was glad; even though he now understood what he’d done wrong, he wasn’t exactly eager to try the rope again in front of everyone. Perception and practice were two very different things.
“I think you get the idea,” Miranda said, her fingers lacing together as she gave Charlie as warm a look as she could manage with eyes cut from ice. “These are the three games we’ll play, because these are the three games we know we can beat. For the next five weeks, we’ll practice here every chance we get: after school, during lunch, during recess. And then we’ll head to Incredo Land. The Solar Avenue games will open at seven a.m. on November third, and we’ll have twelve hours to win as many tickets as we can.”
The other kids came forward as she spoke, forming a small semicircle around her. She turned to open herself up to all of them, her gaze moving from face to face.
“Between the seven of you, we should be able to put together quite a collection. Everyone will take turns hitting these three games; we’ll space it out so that the carnies running them won’t notice how often you’re winning. Then we pool the tickets, give them to Charlie. Charlie turns them in, wins the contest. And gets a shot at spinning the wheel.”
Charlie could hear his heart thudding in his chest as all the attention shifted from Miranda to him.
“It all comes down to that,” Miranda continued. “Charlie, you’ll have one chance. One spin.”
Charlie cleared his throat. It felt like the room had frozen around him.
“And you think I can beat the wheel.”
There was a cough from his right. He was pretty sure it was Greg, but he couldn’t be certain. Then he felt Sam touch his hand with a reassuring finger. It was a tiny motion, the littlest of connections, but it took some of the tension away.
“I know you can beat the wheel,” Miranda responded, smiling like a Cheshire cat. “And so do you.”
Charlie looked from her to Finn, who was tossing one of the gold coins from hand to hand. For a moment, he watched the gold flashing in the low orange light, the way it seemed to dance between Finn’s skilled fingers.
Charlie took a deep breath. He had been going over and over it in his head for the past twenty-four hours, ever since he’d agreed to join the team. Joking and jawing with the Whiz Kids in the library, riding the bus home next to Jeremy, absentmindedly chatting his way through dinner with his parents, slogging through two hours of homework before bed, alone in the dark under his covers, restlessly shifting back and forth until dawn, his mind had been on overdrive the whole time, working it out.
And the truth was, after all that thought, he knew that Miranda was right.
Unlike the games spread out across the back half of that art room, beating the wheel wasn’t going to take skill, or perception, or even practice. Beating the wheel wasn’t going to be a matter of group cooperation, subterfuge, or the sneaky use of simple chemistry. Beating the wheel was actually, in a way, much simpler, for a kid like Charlie Numbers.
Because beating the wheel, at its heart, was just a matter of math.
12
AND THEN THERE WAS darkness.
A thick, soupy, pitch-black darkness filling every inch of the voluminous auditorium, like a velvet dome weighing down every molecule of air, so full and heavy Charlie found it hard to even take a breath.
And suddenly, light. Or more accurately, lightning.
A flash so sudden and fierce that it seemed to crack the very air, followed by a bolt of terrifyingly white electricity running in a single, jagged streak across the center of the auditorium, leaping upward in daggers so sharp, it reminded Charlie of the serrated edge of a hunting knife, or the borders of an angry scar. In that instantaneous glow of the lightning bolt, the
auditorium became momentarily visible, a scene illuminated so fast, it was like looking at a single movie frame frozen beneath a sheet of glass. Down at the center of the vast room, the two giant Textolite columns, six feet in diameter, rising twenty feet right out of the floor, capped by the massive double spheres of the Van de Graaff generator: perfectly round, shiny aluminum, melded together at the center, each fifteen feet tall, reaching halfway to the curved ceiling. The bolt of lighting had erupted right off the surface of the aluminum, rising up above the crowd—a frozen blur of wide-eyed faces staring straight up in equal parts awe and terror. Most had probably never seen anything like the display in front of them; assuredly, they had no idea how the Van de Graaff generator worked, or even that it was the largest air insulated Van de Graaff in existence. That it had been donated by MIT to the museum more than half a century ago. To most of the audience, it was an object of awe and maybe even magic.
Charlie trembled as he watched the streak of white leaping from the generator to the telescoping grounding beacon attached near the high curved ceiling of the auditorium. To him, there was no magic in this room; he knew exactly how the Van de Graaff worked. He knew that one of those massive columns contained a rubber conveyer belt, moving at about sixty miles per hour, carrying high voltage DC current to the aluminum of the hollow spheres. He knew that when the aluminum reached a high enough voltage, the energy leaped from the sphere to the grounding beacon—homemade lightning, as fierce and real as anything a cloud could produce.
This wasn’t the first Sunday afternoon Charlie had found himself in the Theater of Electricity at the Museum of Science; the place was sort of a ritual for him, his first stop whenever his parents took him to the brick-and-glass, multifloored city landmark that squatted on a particularly pretty curve of the Charles River. Charlie had always loved the Museum of Science. As he’d aged, his interests had traveled from exhibit to exhibit. As a toddler, he’d been obsessed with the Discovery Center, which was filled with things you could touch and throw and build. When he was a little older, he’d gravitated toward the dinosaurs on the lower floor of the museum; he could remember many Saturday afternoons spent cowering in the shadows of the great T. rex that dominated the Mesozoic exhibit, wondering how something so huge and terrifying could have ever inhabited the same world that now catered to beings as fragile as humankind. After the dinosaurs, he’d moved on to the exhibit called Science in the Park, which was still his second favorite area of the Museum, after the Van de Graaff generator. Usually overrun with kids his age, Science in the Park was like a playground that had been built specifically for Charlie: swings that helped you calculate and understand harmonic motion, a race track for marble-size balls to teach you about gravity and potential energy, a seesaw to analyze mass and pivot, even a massive pulley system that let you lift hundreds of pounds, breaking down the magic of leverage. If, as Finn had basically said, magic was science you didn’t yet understand, the Science in the Park exhibit was like pulling the curtain back on a dozen magical things at once.
Standing there in the darkness that Saturday afternoon, staring up at the bolt of lightning, Charlie realized that’s exactly what the Carnival Killers was, the place behind the curtain, the science behind what looked, to the uninitiated, like magic. For four long weeks, Charlie had been living behind that curtain.
Over those four weeks, Finn and the rest of the group had guided Charlie through intense practice sessions; three times a week, they’d met after school in the darkened art room, moving from game to game until Charlie had mastered the techniques they had taught him. Even though he’d understood the science behind the techniques from the beginning, actually performing the feats had taken a surprisingly immense amount of training. Getting the gold coins to arc just right, steep enough to counter any forward force but low enough to avoid the stuffed animals, was tough, but even tougher was managing to lick the coins without being so obvious that any carny within ten feet would see what you were doing. Likewise, hitting one of the balloons with the dart was pretty simple; the way the balloons covered the wall, it was actually harder to miss one of the brightly colored things than to hit one. But getting the dart into your pocket and holding it there long enough to let the heat wrap do its thing took skill, speed, and a lot of grade-A acting.
In truth, that was the biggest lesson that Charlie had learned through all that exhausting practice—there was a lot of acting involved in being a Carnival Killer. You couldn’t just master the skills of the games; you had to be able to pull them off under watchful eyes. Finn and Magic, but just as often Greg, Daniel, Jake, and Sam, would take turns playing the parts of the carnival workers, standing beneath the stuffed animals, engaging Charlie in mindless conversation, always seeming to watch what he was doing, always keeping an eye on his hands and the expression on his face.
He’d learned early on that to truly master these games, you had to become a character. Confident, calm, cool, because if you looked nervous, then you looked suspicious, and when you looked suspicious, people watched you more carefully. If you were joking and smiling and playing like you didn’t have a care in the world, nobody noticed when a hand went into your pocket for a few seconds or a coin flashed close enough to your face to touch your tongue.
On top of that, Charlie had begun to develop his own characters—fake personalities that allowed him to pull off the necessary acts without raising any attention. His favorite was Chucky the Easily Amazed—a kid who approached the games like it was his first time seeing them, blown away by every little thing he saw: Wow, these coins are cool, you throw them at the plates, just wow, let me look at this thing up close, okay, here I go, watch it go high up, up, up in the air! And these darts, how cool, they’re so heavy, can I throw two at a time? No, okay, I’ll put this one back on the counter, oh here’s the other one—pop! Wow I did it on my first try? No way!!
After mastering the basics of the games and developing a handful of characters that helped disguise his play, it was just a matter of practice, practice, and more practice. Coins, darts, rope ladder, over and over again. The rope ladder was the most physical of the games, and it had taken Charlie more than a week of falling on his bum—sometimes from high enough up the ladder to cause real bruises—to get the balance right, but he’d eventually been able to get over his fears and master the balancing of his weight on the two ropes to get past the ladder nearly every time he tried. Sam had been exactly right; it was really a matter of perspective. Once you stopped concentrating on the rungs and thought about the dual centers of gravity, it was like unlocking a secret code. That was a good way to describe everything he had learned—unlocking a code—but even so, all the games seemed equally exhausting after the hundredth time. More than once, Charlie’s father had commented about Charlie’s bleary eyes and near catatonic state on the drive home from “math club,” and if Charlie hadn’t been so tired, he’d have felt worse about the lies upon lies he was telling to mask what he was really up to.
But the subterfuge involved in fooling his parents in the late afternoons and evenings to allow him those hours of practice time was minor compared to what he’d been forced to do during the day at school. For as long as he could remember, the Whiz Kids had shared everything, from Marion’s first trip to the emergency room after eating a cookie made with sesame oil, to Jeremy’s mother’s pregnancy and the birth of the little diaper-filler he called a sister. From Kentaro’s spelling-bee awards, to Crystal’s tracking down of one of the rarest shades of granite. In the lunchroom, at recess, in the front hall, waiting for the bus. Those moments together, where everything was fair game and nobody kept anything back, had always been sacred.
But for the past four weeks, Charlie had been a ghost, disappearing as soon as the lunch bell struck, only to reappear at the very end of recess, or rushing off the moment that classes ended, invisible in the hallways and byways as he hurried over to the art room for more practice. Even worse, when he was with the Whiz Kids, he was always monitoring himself to make
sure he didn’t say anything to blow his cover. Finn called it the cardinal rule of the Carnival Killers; on top of all the other rules was the need for utter secrecy. The school might not understand what they were up to, and Miranda had made it clear that it was fundamentally important to her paper on them that they remain an island unto themselves.
At first, for Charlie, that meant lying almost daily about where he went, about Finn and Magic. And then there were the other sort of lies, when he passed one of the other Carnival Killers in the hallways, pretending he didn’t know them, pretending he wasn’t glancing at them when he thought nobody was looking. The worst moments were the few when he and the Whiz Kids strolled past Sam on the way to a class or to the library; forcing himself to look the other way taxed every muscle in his neck and jaw.
Charlie knew that his friends were the smartest kids in the school; the slightest slipup would open Charlie up to an inquisition. He was always one step away from finding himself under a microscope, like a specimen in Crystal’s vast rock collection, pelted and prodded and poked, until he crumbled like so much basalt. To avoid that, he’d kept himself quieter than usual, hardly joining in with the daily banter that was so much the food of their lives. Some days, he didn’t say anything at all, and he could tell that his silence and withdrawn mannerisms were driving a wedge between him and the rest of the group. He knew that by keeping a secret as big as the Carnival Killers from the Whiz Kids, he was endangering the very essence of who they were: a group of geeky, nerdy, genius kids who had found one another, and in so doing, had built a world where they all belonged, where they had protection from the harsh realities of the jungle world that was middle school.
Just two days ago, Jeremy had actually put Charlie’s fears to words while they stood shivering in their down jackets on the sidewalk that bordered the circular school driveway, waiting for their bus.
“If it’s something we did,” Jeremy had started, without any pretext, his eyes downturned, concentrating on a crushed milk carton he’d been bouncing from one booted toe to the other, “you should say something. We can take it. We’ve been called everything in the book.”