Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  The steel casement was turned back like a banana peel. Quentin expanded on his theory. “When the rocket took off, the propellant was so loose it just fell inward. Too much of it burned at once.”

  “The nozzle was probably clogged too,” Billy said, which was a decent observation for his first time on the range.

  We went back and looked at the first rocket. The batter that dripped out had hardened. I dug at it with a stick. “There’s no way this could fall inward,” I said.

  “But that’s been melted,” Sherman observed. “I wonder if it would still burn?”

  To find out, we took a chunk of it to the pad and lit it. It sputtered and then burst into flame. Sherman said what we were all thinking. “What if we melted rocket candy before loading it into the casement?”

  For the first time since we began building our rockets, I hesitated. “I don’t know, boys,” I said. “That sounds like a prescription for getting our heads blown off.”

  The others stood around me, looking concerned and thoughtful. “If we were very careful …” Billy began.

  “Melted just a little bit at a time,” Sherman added.

  “Look, it’s me who would have to do it,” I said. “And I think it’s just going to blow up in my face.”

  “We’ll help you,” Roy Lee said.

  “I’ll build us protective masks with shields and everything,” O’Dell said, his eyes wide with the concept of it.

  “No,” I said. “It would be crazy.”

  We stood around in a circle, kicking at the slack. “I still say we do it,” Roy Lee said quietly.

  “What do you think, Quentin?” I asked.

  Quentin shrugged. “This one’s your call, Sonny. It is a step in the unknown, I’ll warrant, but … damn. It would be a fantastic propellant, I’m sure of it!”

  One night the following week, Roy Lee, Sherman, and I visited Jake’s rooftop telescope. NASA had launched the little thirty-eight-pound Pioneer 1 to the moon. It was America’s first attempt to reach the moon, and we were excited about it. We knew we had no chance of seeing such a tiny object, but we just felt closer to it up on that roof. Pioneer 1 arced through space until, sixty thousand miles out, not quite one-quarter of the way, it lost momentum and dropped back, burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

  The newspapers called Pioneer 1 a failure, but it wasn’t, not for us coal miners’ sons on top of the Coalwood Club House. When Jake went down the ladder to his room, we stayed on the roof, talking about the moon and what it might be like, and occasionally peeking at it through the telescope just in case something about it had changed.

  In fact, it had already changed because we had gone to it in our minds. We had flown the little spacecraft beyond its physical capabilities, zipped past jagged mountains and over the gouges and tears of primordial bombardment, admired all the moon’s craters, its mares, and its mountains. Someday, I was convinced, we would go there. Not just mankind, but us, the boys on that roof. If only we could learn enough and were brave enough. That’s why I decided, up there on that roof, that we would melt saltpeter and sugar.

  11

  ROCKET CANDY

  Auks XII-XIII

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, I began stringing extension cords from the basement up the steps and out into the backyard and over the fence and into the back alley to the other side of the garage, where there was an old picnic table. O’Dell had assembled protective shields for us—baseball caps with squares of clear plastic, rescued out of some garbage can, taped to the bills so they hung down in front of our faces. I put on an old Navy pea coat (it had belonged to my uncle Joe when he was in the Navy during World War II) and winter gloves. The hot plate and pot were from one of Mom’s kitchen cabinets. I didn’t figure she’d miss them before I put them back.

  The hot plate glowed a bright orange. The other boys stood back as I sprinkled saltpeter into the pot. I prayed it wouldn’t blow up in my face. A few drops of liquid formed and then boiled off. Encouraged, I took a tablespoon of saltpeter and dumped it in and then stirred the pot with a wooden spoon also “borrowed” from the kitchen. A clear puddle of liquid formed, and O’Dell, also wearing a ball-cap shield, coat, and gloves, poured in more until there was an inch of liquid steaming in the bottom of the pot. “Now the sugar,” I croaked. Fear made my throat dry.

  O’Dell leaned back at an acute angle and shoveled a little sugar in. Nothing happened except the granules immediately dissolved and a sweet smell, not unlike vanilla fudge, began to wisp up from the pot. Encouraged, he poured more sugar in. I kept stirring until the mix turned viscous and milky.

  “I’ll be gawddamned,” Roy Lee breathed in relief. “It didn’t blow up.”

  “Don’t cuss,” I scolded, sweat trickling into my eyes. “Pray.”

  Sherman put on his cap shield and put an inverted Auk casement on the table. “We need a funnel,” he said.

  Roy Lee was rummaging through the cupboard in the kitchen when my mother found him. “Hi, Mrs. Hickam,” he said, grinning sheepishly. “Sonny needs a funnel.”

  She eyed him suspiciously. “The only one I know of is the one in the garage that his dad uses to change oil in the Buick. What does he want it for?” Then she looked past him to the extension cords. “What are you boys up to now?”

  “Um, melting rocket fuel.”

  Mom held the funnel as she came around the garage. “It smells like fudge,” she said when she caught a whiff of the mix. At her appearance, we all froze. “Well, go ahead,” she sighed. “Do what you’re going to do.”

  Roy Lee gently took the funnel from Mom’s hand and inserted it into the Auk casement. I lifted the pot and tipped it carefully, the rocket candy pouring out. But it hung up in the funnel, backing up and almost overflowing. Mom hurried into the garage, coming back with a long straw torn from an old broom. “Here,” she said, jabbing at the mixture in the funnel.

  “Mom!” I protested, and Roy Lee tugged her arm back. If the stuff caught fire, she didn’t even have one of our pitiful little shields.

  Roy Lee moved Mom back to the garage, and O’Dell took over the straw jabbing. It worked, and the slurry began to flow into the casement. “A glass rod would be better,” Sherman said for future reference.

  The casement was only half full, so I put the pot back on the hot plate to mix up some more. That was a mistake. A thin layer of melted mix had dried on the bottom of the pan. With a whoosh, the stuff erupted.

  “Whoa!” We all fell back. The pot went flying. A puff of vaporous spume rose from the back alley like an Indian smoke signal.

  A group of men going to work stopped to watch. “Hey, Elsie,” one of them called. “You teaching those boys how to cook?”

  Guffawing, several of them strolled in closer, carrying their lunch buckets, their helmets set back on their heads, pants tucked in hard-toe boots. I recognized them as the crew of men out of Anawalt that Dad had brought in for a one-time job, the demolition of a particularly stubborn slab of rock in a new part of the mine. They were sharing a house up in the New Camp part of town. “You boys are stupid, ain’tcha?” one of them said, his big chaw shifting in his cheeks.

  Mom’s eyes narrowed. “Get on to work. These boys aren’t stupid. They’re scientists. I said get!”

  The men trudged on, laughing, and we were left alone with Mom. Every muscle in my body said run, and the other boys seemed halfway at a trot already, although they were actually quite still. Mom picked up her blackened pot and contemplated it. “I think if you wash the pot after you mix this stuff, it won’t explode.” She tapped our plastic face shields, tugged at our coats, inspected our gloves. I started to explain everything, but she held up her hand. “Move that table farther from the garage. You wouldn’t want to burn up your dad’s Buick.” She looked at me. “You’ll buy me a new pot.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She looked at us, one by one. “I’m getting tired of saying this: Don’t blow yourself up!”

  “We’ll write everything down like a
recipe,” I said, trying to assure her. “Wash the pot, clean up everything before we melt another batch.”

  “For sure. Yes, ma’am,” the others mumbled, shifting back and forth on their feet. They still weren’t sure they were going to get out of this without big trouble from Mom.

  “Will this make your rockets fly better?” she asked.

  We looked at one another. We were scared truthful. “Maybe” was all I could say.

  LATE one evening, when usually he was dozing in his easy chair in front of the television set, my father opened the door of my room and walked inside. He caught me idling, doodling the design of a rocket that could fly to the moon. My homework, a stack of it, awaited. “I hear from your mother that you’re thinking about being an engineer,” he said.

  “I guess I don’t know what an engineer does,” I said. “All I know is I want to work on rockets,” I added, just in case we were having an argument that wasn’t apparent yet.

  “There’s a lot more to engineering than rockets,” he said gruffly. He smoothed his voice, as if catching himself. He picked up my drawing and looked it over. “If you’re thinking about being an engineer, you need to see what one does for a living.” He put the drawing back on my desk and looked around my room, one of the first times I think he had ever done that. I had a couple of Auk casements on my dresser, which he stared at for a moment. “All this rocket stuff they’re doing down at Cape Canaveral,” he said, “is just burning up taxpayers’ money to scare the Russians. A real engineer builds things to make money for his company.”

  “Yessir.” I thought by agreeing with him, maybe he’d go away.

  “I’m going to show you firsthand what an engineer does,” he said.

  Then he told me his plan. It was the most remarkable thing. I just gaped at him. “Are you sure?” I puffed up a bit. This was something he’d never asked Jim to do.

  “I’m sure,” he said. “It’s about time you see what this town’s all about.”

  BASIL was at the next launch with his notebook pad, writing furiously. The response from his articles had been so great he had decided to make us a regular feature. Watching us were about fifty spectators, attracted by his articles and our notices. I hoped we wouldn’t disappoint them. Auk XII, on the pad, was built to the design we had more or less standardized, but how it would perform loaded with melted rocket candy was a complete unknown. I feared an explosion, and Quentin was certain of it. “It’ll take at least three rockets loaded in this manner,” he predicted, “before we get the right combination.” Sherman went over to the road to make sure people knew they needed to stay back and it would be best if they got behind their cars and trucks. Buck and some of the football team showed up too. They stood apart, quietly sullen.

  Except for the football boys, our audience was festive. “Go, Big Creek,” some people called out, just as if we were the football team. Then, when we ran up our BCMA flag, they began to sing the school fight song. “On, on, green and white, we are right for the fight tonight! Hold that ball and hit that line, every Big Creek star will shine.…”

  I had never known what it felt like to be on the receiving end of that song. I liked it. A football boy yelled something derisive, but the people kept singing. Afterward some young ladies chanted like cheerleaders, “Go, rocket boys, go!” Disgusted, Buck and the other team members got into their cars and left.

  This was also our first launch with an electrical-ignition system. I touched a wire to a car battery (an old one O’Dell got for free from a War junkyard), and Auk XII shot off the pad and leaned down-range. Quentin ran outside the bunker and fumbled with a new invention he called a “theodolite.” It was a broomstick with an upside-down protractor attached on one end and a wooden straightedge on the opposing side that rotated around a nail. He jammed the stick in the slack and went down on his knees and squinted along the straightedge at the rising rocket, smoke squirming from its tail, white against the brilliant blue of the cloudless sky. At the height of the Auk’s climb, Quentin looked at the angle the ruler made with the protractor and called it out, then snatched a pencil stuck behind his ear and wrote it down on a scrap of paper. If his theodolite worked, trigonometry would give us the altitude of our rocket.

  Auk XII’s exhaust trail was still a fast stream when the rocket faltered and began to fall. It continued to smoke vigorously even after it struck the slack. While our audience cheered, we ran after our rocket and watched the last of its sputtering rocket candy burn up. I immediately saw the reason our rocket had lost its thrust. “The nozzle’s gone,” I told the others. “It must have blown out.”

  We looked closer. The weld was intact. The center of the nozzle was simply eaten away. Quentin came stepping up to us. “Three hundred and forty-eight,” he said, finishing his count by bringing both his feet together at the final step. “I’m figuring about two point seven-five feet per step. That would be”—he made a quick mental calculation—“nine hundred and fifty-seven feet.” Jake’s trig book was under his arm. He ran his finger down the functions in the back. “Let’s see, the tangent of forty degrees is about point eight-four. Call it point eight. Multiply that by nine hundred and sixty …”

  We waited anxiously while Quentin worked it out in his head. It didn’t take long. “Seven hundred and sixty feet!”

  O’Dell whooped and did a little jig on the slack.

  Auk XIII jumped from the pad in a similar blurred frenzy to its predecessor. Rocket candy was definitely hot stuff. The rocket leaned over, puffed a big cloud of smoke, and sped off into the sky. When it fell back, it disappeared into a dense thicket of trees. We heard it hit branches as it fell, a big oak tree waving its golden leaves at us as if signaling, Come and get it. Rocket over here. O’Dell knocked over Quentin’s theodolite in his excitement, so we didn’t get an altitude estimate, but it was obvious it hadn’t gone as high as Auk XII. When we found the rocket, the nozzle was completely worn through. “Maybe it just can’t take the heat,” Billy said.

  I studied the nozzle. “You know what? It looks to me like it’s corroded,” I said.

  “Rapid oxidation!” Quentin said, snapping his fingers. “Sonny, my boy, how quick you are! Of course! I should have seen it myself! Just like in Miss Riley’s class. Heat combined with a steady flow of excessive oxygen—it makes sense. What we need, gentlemen, is a material capable of withstanding heat and oxidation.”

  When we came down off the mountain with our rocket, all the observers were gone, but Buck and the football team were back. They were at our blockhouse, tearing it apart, board by board, using fire irons.

  We roared and ran at them.

  “Come on, little sister morons!” Buck screamed, red in his face.

  We were no match for them, but we had to do something. I picked up a rock, and the other boys did the same. We let loose a barrage, missing for the most part but making them dodge. They charged us, and we knew we were doomed. Then we heard a car horn and Tag Farmer drove his old Mercury out on the slack. While we, football boys and rocket boys, all froze in place, Tag leisurely got out and pushed his constable’s cap to the back of his head. “So, what’s going on, boys?” he drawled.

  “Nothing,” I said. I wasn’t about to turn Buck in. Boys in Coalwood just didn’t do that. “We were just cleaning up the range.”

  Tag nodded toward Buck and the others, still standing with their fists balled and tire irons in their hands. “They helping you?”

  “Yessir.”

  Tag strolled over to the blockhouse, musing over the planks that had been ripped out. “Buck?” he called softly.

  Buck meekly went to the constable. “Yessir?”

  “You a carpenter?”

  “No—no, sir.”

  “It might be time to learn. Looks like some boards came loose on this blockhouse.”

  “Yessir.”

  “You going to take care of this?”

  “Yessir.”

  Tag nodded. Buck stooped and picked up the boards. I came over and han
ded him a hammer from the tool chest we always carried with us, and he got busy. Tag chuckled and stayed around until everybody left.

  ON Sunday morning, I pretended to oversleep, part of Dad’s plan to avoid trouble, and Mom flung open the door to my room. “Get up or you’re going to miss Sunday school!”

  I was about to fib to her, but I had decided it was okay since it was for her good. “I’m pretty worn out, doing so much homework and all. Would you mind if I skipped today? Just this once?”

  She turned and went out of the room. “If you want to be a heathen, who am I to stop you?” She went bawling after Jim to get out of the bathroom and drive her to church. He answered back that he had only been in there for a couple of minutes. I figured it had been at least an hour.

  After Jim and Mom left for church, I walked up the path to the tipple, where Dad waited for me. I was almost shaking with excitement. I’d lived in Coalwood my whole life, but had never been where Dad was going to take me. I was going in the mine! And the fact that he’d asked me, not Jim, had grown even more important through the week whenever I thought about it. He eyed me carefully when I came into his office. “You didn’t say a word about this to your mother, did you?”

  “No, sir!” I said it loud and proud.

  “Right. We’ll get you washed up afterward and she won’t ever know the difference.”

  That part of Dad’s plan I had my doubts about, but I happily went along with it. He knew Mom better than I did, after all. “Come over here,” he beckoned, spreading a map of the mine on a table. He pointed at a winding black streak that ran across it. “That’s the Number Four Pocahontas Seam, the finest and purest soft coal in the world. These lines I’ve drawn represent the tunnels we’ve driven through it since the mine has been operational.” He opened a drawer and brought out another drawing. “This is the side view of a typical seam. The coal is overlaid by a hard shale called draw rock. Underneath is what we call jack rock. Engineers have to know how to hold up the draw rock to keep it from falling and how to move the jack rock out of the way.