Charlie Numbers and the Man in the Moon

by Ben Mezrich

  Crystal looked at him for a beat, and then a smile flashed across her lips. Without a word, she turned and headed for the supplies. Jeremy watched her go, a puzzled look on his face. Charlie snapped a finger, getting his friend’s attention.

  “Find another bowl, fast. Whatever’s left of the baking soda, mix it with water. When Crystal’s done with the hot plate, filter what she’s got—use a towel if you can find one, if not, a big leaf might work. Mix what’s left all together. And then start praying.”

  Charlie grabbed the football and rose, giving Jeremy a little push toward the rest of the supplies. Then he crossed slowly toward where Dylan was standing, pawlike hands on his hips. Dylan pointed toward the high fence that separated the playground from the soccer fields.

  “The fence is about twenty yards away. You couldn’t hit it in your dreams.”

  Charlie squared his shoulders toward the fence, trying to control the tremble moving through his limbs. The football felt huge in his small hand, the rough leather too taut for his fingers to get a really good grip. He could hear the titters of laughter from the crowd behind him; there had to be twenty kids watching.

  To his right, he could hear Crystal and Jeremy working with the supplies. He knew it was going to be tight—if this was going to work, every second was going to count—but he couldn’t stall any longer. If the crowd got restless, Dylan would give them a show and Charlie would be the object sailing toward that fence.

  “Okay, here goes,” Charlie muttered. Then he cocked his arm as far back as he could and let the football fly.

  Even he had to admit it was a pretty pathetic arc. The football wobbled as it flew through the air, barely clearing the metal bar at the top of the swing set. Then it plummeted to the grass, maybe fifteen feet from where he and Dylan were standing.

  “Even worse than I’d expected,” Dylan laughed, in concert with the cackles from the audience.

  Charlie headed to retrieve the football. He tried to ignore the laughter and catcalls coming his way. He moved as slowly as he felt he could get away with, giving Crystal and Jeremy as much time as he could. When he grabbed the ball, he glanced toward the picnic table and saw Crystal pouring the now-heated contents of the casserole pan through a handful of napkins from the lunchroom into an upside-down Frisbee balanced in Jeremy’s hands.

  Perfect. Charlie tucked the football under his arm and headed back toward Dylan. He’d made it about halfway when he allowed himself to stumble—fumbling the football directly toward where Jeremy and Crystal were standing. As Dylan and the watching crowd laughed even harder, Charlie rushed after the football, signaling Jeremy with his eyes as he went.

  Jeremy took two steps forward, the Frisbee out in front of him. Then he, too, stumbled, his long legs connecting, and he dropped the Frisbee, right on top of the football.

  “You and Diapers should open up a circus,” Dylan howled. “Tweedledee and Tweedledum.”

  Charlie reached the football and picked it up from beneath the Frisbee, careful to hold it by its underside. The top of the football was now covered in brownish-white clumps. As Charlie carried it toward Dylan, he did his best to shake the clumps off.

  “It’s kind of dirty,” he apologized. “You want to get a different ball?”

  Dylan yanked the football out of Charlie’s hands.

  “I could beat your throw with a bowling ball. Get out of the way, Numbers.”

  He turned to face the fence, cocked his arm back like an NFL quarterback about to win the Super Bowl, and then threw his arm forward with all his might.

  —And nothing happened. The ball clung to his open palm, the leather stuck to his skin by the white and yellow clumps. Dylan’s eyes widened. He started to curse, violently shaking his hand up and down—and finally the football came loose, tumbling to the dirt right in front of his shoes.

  “Looks like about six inches,” Jeremy said, pointing to where the football had landed. “You want us to get the measuring tape? I’m pretty sure Charlie has you beat.”

  There was a pause—and then the entire audience of sixth graders burst out in laughter. Dylan looked down at his hand, covered in Charlie’s homemade glue. Then a vein rose beneath the skin of his forehead, his cheeks turning a dangerous shade of purple.

  “Numbers,” he growled.

  Charlie took a step back, his heart pounding, a mixture of pride and terror rising in his chest. He knew he was poking a lion with a stick, but beating Dylan, even through a little bit of playground chemistry, felt good. What was going to come next, though, wasn’t going to feel good at all.

  Charlie was about to turn and start running when a loud, adult voice rang through the playground.

  “Charlie Lewis! You’ve got some visitors who need to have a word with you!”

  Mrs. Fowler, Charlie’s fifth-period English teacher, was standing by the open glass doors leading into the lunchroom. Her dowdy, compact four-and-a-half-foot frame was dwarfed by the two figures standing on either side of her: a man and woman, both in dark business suits. The woman had on thick sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat; her features were sharp, almost knifelike, and her lips seemed as thin as the edge of a piece of paper. The man was large and athletic, muscles rippling beneath what was visible of his white shirt. He had a crew cut that reminded Charlie of one of his old G.I. Joe action figures.

  “Hurry up please,” Mrs. Fowler continued. “Ten minutes until the fifth-period bell, and I don’t want any of you missing the start of today’s pop quiz.” A mass groan moved across the playground as the crowd dispersed. Charlie reached for his backpack, then started toward Fowler and the two strangers. As he passed Dylan, the bigger kid leaned toward him, whispering under his breath. “We’ll finish this later,” he hissed.

  Charlie brushed past him as fast as he could. He had no idea who the suited man and woman were, or what they wanted with him, but he was certain they had just saved his hide. Even so, beating Dylan in front of an audience had been worth it—even if it meant Charlie would be watching his back for the rest of the school year.

  Maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe the two strangers were there to spirit him and the Whiz Kids away from Nagassack long enough for Dylan to move on to other targets. Judging from the look on Dylan’s face, a think tank in the Arctic Circle might be just far enough.

  3

  FOR THE MOMENT, UNFORTUNATELY, the back corner of the lunchroom would have to do.

  Charlie’s sneakers squeaked against the polished linoleum floor as he followed the two strangers toward a metal table in the rear of the vast room. Save for the three of them, the place was nearly empty; the seventh graders had already moved on to their next class, and Charlie’s own grade would be outside on the playground for at least another nine minutes—more if the easily confused Mrs. Fowler had miscalculated the time to the fifth-period bell, which happened more often than not. Other than a few hairnet-capped lunch ladies lingering near the buffet at the front of the room, the place was an empty cave, reeking of chlorinated cleaning supplies and the hint of the remnants of overcooked sloppy joes emanating from the stuffed trash barrels running along the far wall.

  When they reached the metal table, the woman gestured for Charlie to take a seat directly across from her. Charlie laid his backpack on the floor by his feet, then watched as the man placed a briefcase between them. The briefcase looked to be plated in steel, with two latches at the top.

  Without a word, without taking off her sunglasses or removing her hat, the woman flicked at the latches with her fingers, opening the top of the case. She removed a pair of white gloves from the interior, pulling them on. Then she retrieved a glass vial from an area of cushy foam padding at the center of the case.

  She held the vial in front of Charlie. The glass was thick and nearly opaque; Charlie could see some sort of small object inside but couldn’t make out any details.

  “My name is Anastasia Federov,” the woman said. “You don’t know me, but I was one of your dad’s students a number of years ago, at
MIT. This is my associate, Mr. Porter. And we’re here because we need your help.”

  Charlie stared at his own reflection in the woman’s sunglasses. Up close, her lips seemed even thinner, if that was possible—like a crack in a windowpane. Her cheeks were tan, and the wisps of hair that hung down from beneath her hat were fine and exceedingly blond. If Charlie had to guess, the woman was in her thirties. Which meant if what she was saying was true, she had been a student of his dad’s at least ten years earlier. Since his dad had been a tenured professor at MIT for his entire adult life, he’d probably had thousands of students. But that didn’t explain what she was doing at Nagassack, or what she wanted with Charlie.

  “My help? I’m just a kid. What could I possibly help you with?”

  Anastasia glanced at her partner, who was as still and silent and stony as his icy-blue eyes. Then she leaned closer over the table, lowering her voice.

  “Two words: rocket propulsion.”

  For a brief moment, her response seemed like it had come right out of left field. Certainly, his dad had taught many engineering classes that included the science behind rocket flight; Charlie had sat in on dozens of them over the years, awed by the blackboard-length calculations that went into the design of rocket engines and the chemical properties of the fuel that launched them into the sky. But what did that have to do with him?

  And then he remembered. It had to have been two summers ago, when Charlie had just turned ten. Just before bed, he’d watched part of a show with his father on National Geographic about the Space Race—detailing the incredible efforts of the engineers who had first managed to get a man on the moon, nearly fifty years ago. Charlie had been so excited by the program, he had spent the entire night under his covers with a flashlight, calculating formulas—force, energy, lift, velocity—to try to mimic a small part of what had gone into that great accomplishment. The next day, he’d dashed off a ten-page paper on the subject. His father had been so proud of what he’d done, he’d entered the paper into a science blog contest at the university. The paper hadn’t won anything, but Charlie’s young age had impressed the judges enough to get him an honorable mention in the MIT school newspaper.

  Two years later, Charlie hadn’t imagined that a paper he’d written as a ten-year-old could have attracted the attention of anyone outside of his circle of family and friends. Especially anyone who wore suits to visit a middle school or carried a briefcase plated in steel.

  “Who are you, exactly?” Charlie asked, his nerves rising. “You’re obviously not a student anymore. Why would you be interested in what a kid thinks about rocket propulsion?”

  “We work for NASA,” Anastasia said.

  NASA. Even the name of the place took Charlie’s breath away. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was the organization responsible for the US space program, current and past. It was funded and run by the government, a haven for the best scientists in the world. The very people who had first put a man on the moon.

  “So you’re engineers?” Charlie asked. “You build spaceships?”

  “Not exactly.”

  The woman looked at her partner again, who remained as still as ever. The man looked like he’d been chiseled right out of marble—with all the personality of a statue. Even so, Charlie’s excitement was growing. He’d always dreamed of visiting NASA—maybe even one day, when he was older, being a part of the team of scientists who worked at the organization, creating the next generation of space vehicles. But he never, in his wildest dreams, imagined that NASA would come looking for him.

  “What does that mean? You’re not scientists?”

  Instead of responding, Anastasia tapped the glass vial in front of her with one of her gloved hands. The object inside shifted, coming closer to the glass—and Charlie saw that it was some sort of tiny rock. Rough and pockmarked, with flecks of reflective material that, even through the thick glass, flashed beneath the lunchroom’s fluorescent lights.

  “Do you know what this is?” Anastasia asked.

  Charlie shook his head. Through the sunglasses, he couldn’t tell if the woman was looking at him or the vial.

  “This is one of the most valuable objects on earth.” She paused for a beat, to let that sink in. “A moon rock. The rarest of all rocks, brought back by the original Apollo astronauts nearly fifty years ago. It’s priceless.”

  She set the vial back down in the aluminum suitcase and carefully peeled her gloves off, one by one. Then she reached up and grasped the plastic arm of her sunglasses, slowly lowering them down to the bridge of her nose. Her green eyes pierced Charlie as if they were searing right through his head.

  “A significant amount of these moon rocks went missing from NASA’s vaults a few months ago. We were close to finding them; then our lead fizzled out.”

  She handed Charlie one of the white gloves and signaled with a nod for him to put it on. As he pulled the soft material over his fingers, he could feel the remnant warmth from Anastasia’s skin. When the glove was fully covering his skin, Anastasia pointed to the vial in the suitcase.

  Charlie stared at her. She nodded again, and Charlie gingerly reached for the vial. It felt light—almost too light—in his hand. He held the glass close to his eyes, looking at the rock inside.

  “We need your help, Charlie. I can explain everything—but not here. If you’re willing to hear more, meet us at the Museum of Science today, after school. And I will tell you the rest.”

  Charlie looked at the rock for a moment more, then carefully placed the vial back into the foam padding in the center of the briefcase. It had felt good to hold something so incredibly rare—not because of how much it might be worth, but because he knew how lucky he was just to have even seen a piece of the moon. He thought back to the documentary he had watched with his father, which showed the phenomenal effort it had taken to get that first rocket into space, that first man all the way to that first, giant leap. Thousands of the greatest scientific minds in history had worked together to make it possible. The Apollo astronauts who had brought those moon rocks back to Earth were real and true heroes.

  The woman in front of him—with her sunglasses; her marble, silent partner; and her steel suitcase—was more of a mystery. But a chance to work for NASA, no matter how bizarre it sounded—well, that was something Charlie couldn’t easily pass up.

  At the very least, he owed it to those hero astronauts to hear what this woman had to say.

  4

  A CONTINUOUS BAND OF rubber with a single twist, rotating over a chain of metal cogs. Twisting and turning behind a pane of bulletproof glass, so close Charlie could hear the whir of the mechanics, could smell the grease that kept the cogs forever spinning. No matter how many times Charlie had stood in that exact place, staring through that viewing panel—dull and scratched in the center from so many years of wear and tear—it never got old. A masterpiece of physics and engineering, and yet in this place barely an exhibit, just a little detail that most visitors walked right past.

  “It’s just an escalator,” Jeremy said, spindly arms crossed as he stood next to Charlie by the window. “I mean, the inside of an escalator. You’re the only kid I know who can get so excited by a darn escalator.”

  Jeremy was right; on the surface, it was just an escalator. More accurately, the revealed inside of the escalator that ran up the spine of Boston’s Museum of Science, one of the premier science museums in the entire country. Charlie had been to the museum many times with his parents and friends; as a toddler, he had spent nearly every Saturday morning racing from exhibit to exhibit, his father huffing and puffing to keep up. Located on a beautiful twist of the Charles River, with a view of the duck boats purring along the banks of the necklace of parks that connected Back Bay with the interior of the city and Beacon Hill, the museum was beloved by science-minded kids within a hundred-mile radius. Here, even an escalator could be something to marvel at, from the inside out.

  “On top it’s an escalator. Inside, it’s a Möbius
strip. A band of rubber that can rotate round and round, pulling the steps up forever—and because of the Möbius motion, no side of the band ever gets worn out.”

  Jeremy sighed. He’d been to the museum with Charlie before, maybe hundreds of times. They’d grown up together—heck, their parents had met in childbirth classes months before either of them were born.

  “So you brought me here to look at the escalator again? I turned down a trip to the circus with my annoying little sister for this?”

  Charlie blinked hard, finally pulling himself away from the glass viewing panel. He felt a little bad about the circus. Jeremy’s parents had invited Charlie along too, and it had been tricky to explain to both sets of parents that they’d rather spend their afternoon at the Museum of Science. Charlie had considered telling his own dad the truth—the woman, Anastasia, had been Charlie’s dad’s student, after all—but he wanted to know more, first, and in his mind, information held back wasn’t really lying, was it?

  No matter how interesting or hypnotic the inside of an escalator was, watching the Möbius strip wasn’t why they were really there. They were on a mission.

  Charlie took Jeremy by the hand and pulled him around the corner to the base of the escalator. They stepped on in unison and began the slow descent to the museum’s bottom floor.

  “Jeremy, just follow my lead.”

  “You’re really not going to tell me why we’re here?”

  Charlie paused a beat. Then he shrugged.

  “The truth is, I’m not really sure. The woman, Anastasia, just told me to meet her here. And I didn’t want to go alone. So—”

  “So you dragged me here even though they think you are coming alone? I don’t know, Charlie. I don’t have a good feeling about this. I don’t want to get into any trouble. My parents are still trying to figure out if they should be punishing me for what we did at Incredo Land or getting me some sort of trophy.”