Charlie Numbers and the Man in the Moon

by Ben Mezrich

  “My dad says you’re in good hands,” Caldwell continued. “She’s supposed to be one heck of a flight engineer. Really great scientist, despite what happened with her at NASA.”

  “What happened at NASA?” Kelly asked, saving Charlie the trouble.

  “She left after some sort of disagreement with the director of her lab. They were working on new materials for spacecraft—the same thing my dad works on now—and they were on the verge of a breakthrough involving a new type of metal. Anastasia thought it was something that could make a lot of money for the right company, but her boss felt it should remain a NASA development. So she left the company and joined the start-up. Rumor is, she’s still working on the same material. But she hasn’t gotten anywhere yet. I guess her research has stalled enough to give her time to proctor and advise your paper airplane team. Good news for you!”

  Charlie was trying to take in everything Caldwell had said when he saw Crystal making eyes at him from the dinner table. The noise level in the room was at its peak, and the Worth Hooks team—minus Kelly—was at the table as well. This was as good a moment as they were going to get. Charlie would have to digest the information about Anastasia later. For the moment, he needed to return to his role as a reluctant spy.

  He ran a hand through his hair, and Crystal nodded. Then she made the same motion, hand through her hair, toward Jeremy, Kentaro, and Marion. Jeremy and Marion nodded, but Kentaro was so deep into a bowl of pork stew he didn’t notice until Jeremy picked up a dinner roll and lofted it at Kentaro’s forehead, hitting him right between the eyes.

  Kentaro looked up, then nodded. And then he climbed up onto his chair, standing up to his full height.

  “Ladies and gents, I’d like to make a toast. To our host with the most, the only kid I’ve ever met who can bring a space suit to show-and-tell. Richard, how about a few words to get this night going right?”

  The sight of Kentaro in his bright red jumpsuit standing on a chair had the crowd smiling, and Caldwell couldn’t have resisted, even if he’d wanted to. He excused himself from Charlie and Kelly and headed toward the table. Kelly gave Charlie’s hand a squeeze, then followed.

  “Maybe just one story,” Caldwell started, and Charlie knew he had his moment.

  14

  “SLOW DOWN, TIGER. YOU’RE going to get us noticed.”

  Crystal was breathing hard behind Charlie as she struggled to keep up with his pace. His socks were moving so fast against the thick Oriental carpet that ran down the center of the long hallway leading into the interior of the home that he actually thought he might see sparks. It had been Crystal’s idea to ditch their shoes in the planter next to the steps that had led down from the dining level to their target area on Anastasia’s map to make their journey more soundless, but she somehow seemed to move slower without those rubber soles. Or maybe it was just the adrenaline coursing through Charlie’s veins, pushing him to get this over with as fast as he could.

  “The faster we go, the less chance we have of anybody spotting us down here.”

  “Yeah, but if we do get caught, we’re going to look mighty suspicious jogging through the house at top speed. Don’t forget our cover story: We got turned around looking for the bathroom.”

  It had to be the oldest cover story in the book, but Charlie hadn’t had time to come up with anything better.

  “Sometimes you need to run when you’re looking for the bathroom. Maybe we don’t do so well with a menu consisting of eighty different variations of pork.”

  “You’re disgusting,” Crystal said. “Better not let your new girlfriend hear you talk like that. She’s going to run for the hills.”

  Charlie slowed enough to toss a look at Crystal over his shoulder. “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s just nice, that’s all.”

  “Nice girls don’t hang around with bullies like Ryan.”

  “Ryan’s a special case. He’s had a rough life. They’ve all had it pretty rough, and they don’t have a lot of the things we have.”

  “Cry me a river,” Crystal said. “Why are you making excuses for her anyways? Ryan isn’t her charity case; he’s her teammate and friend.”

  Charlie thought he detected more than a hint of jealousy in Crystal’s voice.

  “You’re as pretty as she is,” Charlie tried. “You just make different choices about how you present yourselves.”

  Crystal stopped dead in her tracks and put her hands on her hips.

  “Charlie, for a smart kid you really are an idiot.”

  Charlie stopped too, looking at her. He had no idea what he’d said wrong, or why she was suddenly so mad. He’d never really understood girls. And the truth was, he’d never really thought of Crystal as a girl. Not in that way. But he had noticed, she did tend to get angry whenever he paid attention to other girls like Kelly. He chalked it up to a bit of possessiveness; the Whiz Kids were a close bunch, after all. It couldn’t be anything personal. This was Crystal.

  “Look, Kelly seems to have eyes for only one kid in this competition, and we’re sneaking around his house. Something we better get back to quickly, before someone notices we’re gone.”

  “We don’t need to sneak any farther,” Crystal huffed, pointing ahead.

  Right in front of them was a thick wooden door with an electronic keypad to one side.

  “This is going to be tricky,” Charlie said, happy to be changing the subject.

  He tried the door, confirming that it was locked. Then he approached the keypad. There were fifty numbered keys spread across the face of the rectangular device and space for a five-number code. Charlie quickly did the math. Fifty keys, a five-number combo—that worked out to 254,251,200 possible permutations. Two hundred and fifty-four million . . .

  “Move out of my way, lover boy.”

  Crystal gave him a little shove, then stepped in front of the electronic lock. She reached into the pocket of her dress and removed a glass test tube filled with yellowish-tan powder.

  “What the heck is that?” Charlie asked.

  She carefully opened the top of the test tube.

  “Just a little something from my travel collection.”

  Crystal hadn’t let any of the other Whiz Kids sift through the small tackle box she kept in her suitcase, and they’d assumed it contained her favorite rocks, the ones she couldn’t bear to leave at home, even for a week-long trip. Obviously, it contained more than just some polished quartz.

  “It’s called lycopodium powder. It’s derived from a species of moss called Lycopodium clavatum. Wolf’s foot, as it’s more commonly known. You might want to step back, because it’s actually quite flammable when it touches air. They use it in fireworks and explosives.”

  Charlie nearly jumped to the other side of the hallway.

  “You’re going to blow the door up?”

  “No, even though it’s flammable, it’s so light that in small quantities, it burns right up in the air. Magicians use it to create bright flashes to distract their audiences. But it also has another property. It’s used to dust for fingerprints. See, the human finger contains an inordinate amount of oils. When you touch something, like a key on an electronic lock, you leave some of these oils behind. Certain powders can detect these oils.”

  She carefully leaned toward the keypad and tipped the test tube, spilling just the tiniest amount of powder over the keys. Most of the powder burned in the air before it hit the ground, but almost immediately, five of the keys caught a light dusting of the yellowish-tan stuff.

  “There you go. Zero, two, seven, six, nine.”

  Charlie whistled.

  “That was amazing—but wait. If these are the right numbers, what order do they go in?”

  “The powder can’t tell us that,” Crystal said, capping the test tube and putting it back in her pocket. “But maybe we can figure it out.”

  Five numbers still left 120 possible combinations. It would take them a long time to try them all out, and there was a very good chance the lock would have so
me sort of safety mechanism that set off an alarm if they tried more than three.

  They had to figure it out another way. Five numbers, one combination. Zero, two, seven, six, nine. Charlie closed his eyes and let the numbers bounce around inside his head. Zero, two, seven, six, nine. He realized there was something familiar about those numbers, something that his subconscious recognized, even though his conscious mind couldn’t quite see it.

  “Maybe we should turn back,” Crystal said. “Tell Anastasia we have to find another time to sneak in. If we had a black light, we might be able to see which keys had more finger oil than the rest, and make a better guess as to which was pressed later than the rest.”

  “We don’t need a black light,” Charlie said suddenly.

  And then he opened his eyes.

  He moved straight to the keypad and began hitting numbers.

  “Seven. Two. Zero. Six. Nine.”

  There was a loud metallic click, and the door swung inward.

  “How did you do that?”

  Charlie grinned.

  “Numbers is my name, isn’t it?”

  “Charlie.”

  “Seven. Twenty. Sixty-nine. It’s the date of the first moon landing. What better password is there for a former astronaut?”

  With that, he led her through the open doorway.

  15

  IF THEY HAD THOUGHT the foyer looked like a museum, with its marble floors, elegant chandeliers, and the astronaut suit, Buzz Caldwell’s “study” was even more grand. Here the floors were carpeted, and the ceilings lit by ornate sconces jutting from the even more ornate molding—but every square inch of wall was covered by display cases containing space paraphernalia that would rival any collection of the Smithsonian’s. The front of the room contained three glass cases with mahogany trim, all of them tall enough to come up way past Charlie’s head. Inside each case stood an astronaut space suit, but these weren’t the white “indoor” suits like the one in the foyer, these were bright orange and excessively bulky, with helmets embossed in gold as big as a giant bug’s eye. Charlie knew from his own reading that the orange color hadn’t been chosen as a fashion statement; orange, it turned out, offered the biggest contrast to ocean water. These suits had been designed for ocean rescue, after the astronaut completed his guided plummet back to Earth.

  “ ‘Advanced Crew Escape Suit,’ ” Crystal whispered, reading the words from a metal plate at the base of the display case. “Can you imagine zooming down from space in one of those? I mean, you’re inside a capsule, but still. You couldn’t get me inside one of those for fifty cash prizes.”

  Charlie felt differently; heck, he’d have traded college to go to space. But Crystal was a rock hound, so it was no surprise she intended to keep her feet on solid earth.

  “The suits are more than just protection,” Charlie said. “They contain air, water, medical supplies, and a parachute. If there’s an accident on the way down, the astronaut can jettison himself and come down in just the suit. Pretty insane.”

  Charlie felt a new pang of guilt. Buzz Caldwell had actually been in one of these suits, and now Charlie was sneaking around his study. He pushed the thought away as he saw Crystal move to a new set of display cases. Her eyes went wide. It was like she’d just found the Hope Diamond.

  “Rock samples,” she whispered.

  Charlie rushed to her side. Will it possibly be this easy?

  But when he got next to her, he realized she wasn’t looking at moon rocks. Anyone else would have had trouble identifying the three-centimeter-long, egg-shaped, black-and-gray-speckled sample, but Crystal knew what it was immediately.

  “A meteorite. That one too—” She pointed to a rusty-orange rock next to the egg-shaped one. “That was found in Arizona; it’s mostly iron. Highly magnetic. And next to that, a ten-centimeter meteorite from Africa. Look at the large surface dimples and the rich black crust. You only see that in newly fallen meteorites. They get that way because they are superheated on their way down through the atmosphere. Geez, this is like a space-rock candy shop!”

  Charlie was happy for her enthusiasm, but he concentrated on searching for moon rock clues. There were obviously no moon rocks in the case, but toward the back, he did see something inside the glass that made him pause. An old metallic-looking case, unlocked and open. Within the case were a half dozen pale yellow velvet grooves, big enough to have once contained fairly large rock samples.

  “I can’t be sure, but I think that might have been where they were once stored,” Charlie said. “That case looks old—maybe dating back to the sixties or seventies. It could very well have come from NASA. Anastasia would probably know for sure. Do you have your camera?”

  “You think I carry a test tube full of fingerprint powder, but I don’t have a camera?”

  She reached into her other dress pocket and retrieved Kentaro’s disposable camera. She held it up to the case and flicked the switch. To both their surprises, the flash went off, temporarily blinding them in the fairly dark room.

  “You didn’t turn off the flash?!” Charlie hissed.

  “Wouldn’t have been able to see anything in the picture!”

  “Yeah, but that was bright. If someone was walking by—”

  Charlie stopped talking as a strange metallic clicking filled the air. He turned his head up, toward the source of the noise, and saw a mounted camera in the far corner of the room tracking toward them.

  “A security camera,” he hissed. “It wasn’t activated when we came in, because we used the proper security code on the lock. But the flash must have set it off.”

  “Let’s move. We can get past if we stay low.”

  Charlie hoped she was right. He dropped to a crawl and skittered as fast as he could toward the door. Crystal was so close she was nearly grabbing at his socks. A moment later, they were almost into the hall when Crystal tapped his ankle. He looked back and saw that she was pointing to a group of magnetic ID cards hanging from a hook on the wall, right by the door.

  “Aerospace Infinity key cards,” she whispered. “They might come in handy.”

  “We need to get out of here—”

  “I can reach one,” Crystal said. Before Charlie could stop her, she leaped up, swiping the top card from the hook. Then she was back into her crawl.

  A second later, they were out into the carpeted hallway, breathing hard.

  “That was dangerous,” Charlie coughed. “If the camera had caught us . . .”

  He left the thought hanging in the air. Crystal shrugged, holding the ID card up in front of her. Then she turned it over and paused.

  “Look, Charlie. Is this what I think it is?”

  It took Charlie a moment to understand the perspective, but then his eyes widened.

  “A map,” he said. “I think it’s the Air and Space Museum. That section over there is the track where we had our competition, where we’ll have the semis and finals tomorrow. But what is that green dot? An exhibit of some sort?”

  “These cards don’t open exhibits, Charlie. These open doorways. I think we just found a way into Aerospace Infinity’s laboratories.”

  Charlie stared at her, stunned.

  “You think Aerospace Infinity has a lab inside the Air and Space Museum?”

  “Not inside.”

  “Then where?”

  Crystal stuffed the ID card into her pocket, next to the test tube. She wasn’t going to tell him any more here. Even so, Charlie had to admit, she made a darn good spy. James Bond had nothing on Crystal Mueller.

  “Let’s get back to the party,” she said, rising to her feet as the study door clicked shut behind them. “By now, knowing Kentaro, Caldwell has been forced to tell enough stories to get everyone to the moon and back ten times over.”

  Charlie followed her back down the hall, stifling the urge to jog as they worked their way back toward the dining floor. On the outside, they tried to look as casual as possible, but neither of them stopped breathing hard until the scent of bacon o
nce again hovered in the air.

  16

  “WELL, THIS IS A first! We have a tie!”

  The referee’s voice reverberated through the overhead speaker system as the crowd erupted in noise. The entire hall seemed to tremble with the sound, and Charlie felt himself instinctively shrinking back at the starting line, his eyes still focused on the little fleck of white so far down the track it looked like a drop of snow.

  A hundred and eighty-nine feet, another new record—except this time, Charlie’s plane wasn’t sitting on the record-breaking finish mark alone. Right next to his tiny fleck of white sat another snowflake. The two airplanes had landed at exactly the same spot, their noses right next to each other. So close that the referee had resorted to a ruler to confirm—a tie.

  “I really didn’t think you had it in you.”

  Ryan was standing next to Charlie on the starting line, and he, too, seemed to have shrunk back a step in the face of all that noise. Charlie looked at him, surprised.

  “No snarky remark? No joke about my weak arm or bad eyesight?”

  Ryan grinned.

  “Not today, shrimp. That was a real good throw. I thought my pitch was unbeatable. Well, technically, it was. But maybe Kelly isn’t entirely wrong about you.”

  Despite the moment, despite all the noise and the pressure, Charlie couldn’t help himself.

  “Kelly said something about me?”

  Ryan rolled his eyes. Then he turned around and jogged through the applauding crowd back to his folding table. He was right—there was no time to talk; they were both going to need a second plane to break the tie. The winner was going against Caldwell in the finals. Caldwell’s plane, which had dispatched the plane from the Dallas team by a good twenty feet, at a totally respectable 180 feet, was as sleek and perfect as ever. Charlie and Ryan had both just set a record, beating Caldwell’s distance, but every throw was different. A breath of wind, a patch of humid air, a bit of dust—anything could shake up a throw at those distances.