Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  The word had spread after our last launch that our big new rockets were potentially dangerous to spectators. It didn’t keep them from showing up, but I saw some of the miners had brought their helmets with them. Roy Lee ran our BCMA flag up the pole. That was the final signal. I looked at the flag with some concern. It was snapping in the wind—pop, pop, pop.

  I put my worry aside. This was a big, heavy rocket. It should fly straight and true. I went inside the blockhouse and knelt behind the wooden console Sherman and O’Dell had built. They had even installed a switch salvaged off an old electric-train transformer. I toggled it, and the zincoshine-propelled rocket blasted off with a savage roar. It flew straight, slicing without flinching through the plane of the mountaintops. Sherman counted. “Ten, eleven, twelve …”

  I watched as the smoke trailed off from the Auk, and then it disappeared—still on a heading for Coalwood. “No!” I yelled, horrified.

  Sherman looked up from his watch. “Huh?”

  Roy Lee saw what I was seeing. “Oh, shit!”

  All of the other boys looked up the valley, and so did our audience. In unison, almost everybody repeated exactly what Roy Lee had just said. We ran for his car, the crowd scattering before us. We roared up the road, plastering our faces to the car windows, looking for any sign of our wayward Auk. “You know,” Quentin said learnedly, “I suspect the velocity of a rocket also affects its stability at moments of maximum stress—”

  “Shut up, Quentin.”

  “Perhaps there are ratios of wind pressure to velocity that can be mathematically calculated. Interesting! I think—”

  “Shut up, Quentin!”

  Frog Level was peaceful, so we kept going. Up ahead, at Middletown, we saw a crowd near the road. People were running to see whatever it was. Roy Lee moaned. “We’ve killed somebody!”

  Auk XXII-D had landed in the field beside Little Richard’s church, a patch of flat ground that was often used for pickup touch football and softball games. Totally panicked, certain we’d killed some unsuspecting playgrounder, we pushed through the crowd and found our rocket buried in the grass, with only its fins and nozzle showing. The odor of sulfur was strong. I was so relieved I started to laugh, and everybody in the crowd laughed with us. “Gawd, you boys will be flyin’ all the way up to Washington Dee Cee you keep at it this way,” Tom Tickle roared. Good old Tom was a miner who had always supported us.

  Roy Lee got out a shovel from the trunk of his car and began to dig the rocket out, while people talked about where each of them was when it fell and what it sounded like and how it shook the ground. Mr. Fuller showed up in his truck. He took one look. “You boys are a damn menace!” he announced. “You’ve fired off your last rocket in this town.”

  Here we go again, I thought.

  “Now, looky here,” the Reverend Richard said to Mr. Fuller, “don’t be talkin’ ’bout stoppin’ these boys. We’re proud of ’em!”

  “You can’t shut our rocket boys down,” Tom said. “Leave ’em alone. Weren’t nobody hurt!”

  A grumble of assent rose from the crowd. Mr. Fuller surveyed us. “They fly on company land, and from what I’ve observed, they do it with company property. I’m the company, and I’m telling you they won’t fly anymore.”

  “Suh,” Reverend Richard said, “you may be the comp’ny, but these men and these ladies around you, they is the town.”

  “The boys keep flyin’,” Tom said, stepping up to Mr. Fuller. “You can sell our houses, charge us for the air we breathe, I guess, but you ain’t stoppin’ these boys.”

  A woman I recognized as Reverend Richard’s piano player jostled Mr. Fuller. “Our town was just fine before you came,” she told him. “Now, don’t you go pullin’ those Yankee airs around here, mister, sayin’ what you gonna do and what you ain’t gonna do.”

  Mr. Fuller retreated to his truck. He stuck out his jaw in my direction. “I’ll be talking to your dad!”

  “Keep flyin’, boys,” Tom said to us. “Keep on puttin’ those rockets in the sky.”

  “But it might be nice if you aimed a little more that way,” somebody else said, pointing back to Cape Coalwood.

  As soon as I got home, Dad called me up to the mine. I took a deep breath and then trudged up the path. The door to his office was ajar. He was pondering a mine diagram with one hand held over his bad eye. He turned at my knock, and when I saw him I was shocked at his appearance—not so much his watery ruined eye, but his gaunt face. I had seen little of him since the announcement that the houses were to be sold. He reached for his hat. “Let’s go for a ride,” he said, and walked me to his truck. I noticed he had a bit of a limp, although the accident had not, to my knowledge, hurt his legs. He seemed somehow smaller than I remembered him being.

  I wanted to ask him where we were going and why, but I held back. He drove us slowly down the road, past our house and the Coalwood School and through the corridor of houses that led to the center of town. I was startled to see that one of the houses across the creek was in the process of being painted a bright yellow. In the line of houses still painted company white, it stood out, a bright, brave statement that things weren’t the same anymore. It was a sold house, one of the first, and Dad looked at it and wiped his mouth as if he were throwing away the words he wanted to say.

  We drove past the community church, the cross on top slightly askew. The padlock on its double doors was huge, more suitable for the gates of heaven or hell, I thought, than a little West Virginia church. We drove past Little Richard’s church and then down through Frog Level. It was clear we were headed for Cape Coalwood. “I thought you should see this, Sonny,” Dad said when I looked at him questioningly, “rather than just hear about it.”

  When Cape Coalwood came into view, I saw a bulldozer covering up our launchpad. Mr. Fuller was walking beside the bulldozer, directing the driver. Boards that had once been the BCMA blockhouse were stacked alongside the road, and there was a single strand of barbed wire across the entrance to the slack dump. Hanging on it was a flat square plate with a message from Mr. Fuller, the company, and the steel mill that owned it:

  NO TRESPASSING

  My blood boiled at the sight of it. “Dad, you gave me this place!”

  He gripped the steering wheel and stared at the bulldozer. “You promised to never let another rocket land in Coalwood.”

  “That was an engineering error, and we’ve already fixed it.”

  “Mr. Fuller made this decision,” he said, “and he had every right to do it.”

  “What right? You gave us that lumber, we didn’t steal it. The same with the cement for the launchpad.”

  Dad considered me for a moment, as if trying to decide whether to proceed. “Listen, little man,” he said finally, “there’s not a damn thing I can do about this. You don’t like the way things are run around here? Go to college and then come back here. In a few years, I bet you’d be running the whole place.”

  My potential for arrogance made a sneak attack on me. I said, “Dad, when I get out of this stinking hole, wild horses couldn’t drag me back.”

  My words were meant to hurt him, and they did. He sucked in a breath and raised his hand at me. I waited, knowing I had gone too far, but no blow fell. He let his hand drop into his lap. “I can’t believe you’d say that about Coalwood,” he said.

  I was instantly sorry. Damn me and my smart mouth! Just then, Roy Lee and O’Dell came racing up in Roy Lee’s car. They got out and surveyed the scene, looking to me for guidance. I got out of the truck and led them to the stack of our lumber. I picked up a board and they did too. “We’re going to build our blockhouse back,” I said.

  Another car arrived, this one with Sherman and his dad in it. Then another, this one with some of our machinists, and then another with Mr. Dubonnet, Tom Tickle, and some of the other miners. They all stood at the barbed wire. Dad got out of his truck and limped over to where we were. “Homer, this isn’t right,” Mr. Dubonnet told him.

  “This is com
pany business,” Dad replied without his usual vehemence.

  “We ain’t company,” Tom said. “We’re union.”

  “You men go on home now,” Dad said, but there was no force to his words.

  “Not until we build back the boys’ blockhouse,” Tom said.

  The men pulled down the barbed wire and started to cross the slack with the lumber. Mr. Fuller ran up and started yelling at them, but they pushed past him. Mr. Dubonnet stopped at the bulldozer and had a word with the operator, who immediately started to scrape off our pad. I turned at the blockhouse site and watched Dad walk over to Mr. Fuller, who was huffing and puffing and yelling at everybody. Dad touched him on his shoulder and he whirled and went up on tiptoe, yelling in Dad’s face. Dad took it for a while and then suddenly reached out, clutched the little man’s leather jacket, and lifted him right up off the ground. Roy Lee pointed over at them. “Guess your Dad’s negotiating,” he chuckled. Mr. Dubonnet looked and laughed aloud.

  Mr. Fuller stomped off the slack, and Dad came over and drew me aside. “You’ve got a wide open field. If you want tubing, machine work, aluminum sheeting, just tell Leon Ferro and I’ll sign his requisition. If you fail now, you can’t blame me. You’ll have only yourself to blame. Understood?”

  I grinned at him. “Understood, sir.”

  22

  WE DO THE MATH

  Auks XXIII-XXIV

  A FEW DAYS later, Mr. Fuller abruptly left town. The fence said Dad had run him out, but I think the real reason was he had done his job for the steel company as the designated hatchet man. A new general superintendent arrived a week later, a Mr. Bundini. Mr. Bundini was a gentleman reminiscent of Mr. Van Dyke, but he also brought with him more bad news from the steel company. The mine was ordered to go to a four-day workweek. Dad met with his foremen and told them a twenty percent cut in salaries—his included—would take effect immediately.

  The fall season blew in with a rush of cold wind, the maple trees in the yard flashing orange and then dumping their leaves as if in a hurry to get it over with. It was usually Jim’s job to rake up the leaves, but this year it fell to me. It was one of the little things that reminded me my brother was really gone, along with the oddly unsettling silence from his room. His class had scattered. The gossip that reached me said Valentine Carmina and Buck Trant had married. O’Dell said he thought Buck had “lit out for Detroit,” gone there, I supposed, to build cars. I worried for Valentine and hoped she was all right.

  Jim had stopped taking Dorothy out a few weeks after their first date, a typical move, the chase more important to him than the catch. He had gone off to college with his football scholarship in July. Letters and phone calls from him indicated that he was doing well on the practice field, but needed frequent cash infusions to keep his wardrobe up to college standards. Mom wrote the necessary checks and mailed them off.

  Besides my class moving up to senior status, there were other changes at the high school. Big Creek was off football suspension, but Coach Gainer had left for a big school upstate. Big Creek was no longer a powerhouse. The football team lost three out of its first four games.

  Dorothy was a majorette in the band, strutting up and down the field in front during our halftime shows. She looked exceptionally fine. Although I hated myself when I did it, I couldn’t help but sneak furtive peeks at her every chance I got. She kept trying to catch my eye during band practice or in class, but I refused to give her the satisfaction of looking back. When she cornered me in the hall one morning and started to tell me how sorry she was about Jim, how she just didn’t know how I felt, I looked right through her. Then, after she was gone, I looked after her like a lost puppy. I missed her. I admitted it to myself if to no one else, especially her.

  With Jim gone, I had access to the Buick on Saturday nights, and Roy Lee and I raced all the way from Coalwood to the Dugout. After we got over the mountain, he never had a chance in his old rattletrap. With two four-barrel carburetors, I could get the Buick up to one hundred miles an hour on Little Daytona. I gloried in the recklessness it took to reach that velocity. It felt so good, the big car snorting and the steering wheel shimmying and the bushes and trees on both sides turning into green blurs. After the dance, Roy Lee tried a couple of times to beat me to the drive-in in English. He was better on the curves than me, never hitting his brakes, but as soon as we got on any kind of straightaway, I had him. After a while, he stopped racing with me. “I just wanted to have some fun, Sonny,” he said, “but you act like you’re trying to prove something.” I figured I was just a better driver than him and he couldn’t take it.

  As Dad promised, all I had to do was to tell Leon Ferro what I needed for the BCMA and it was delivered—steel tubing, sheet aluminum, SAE 1020 bar stock, whatever I wanted. When Mr. Ferro called to let me know of the new materials, he asked for no trade, volunteering to do whatever I asked of him. Everything was in place for us to take the next big step in rocket design. Auk XXIII was going to be the first rocket to be based on the sum total of Miss Riley’s book, the calculus that Quentin had learned in Mr. Hartsfield’s class and that I had learned on my own, coupled with the practical knowledge we had gained through two years of failure and success.

  Quentin thumbed over to Coalwood on a Saturday in November, and we went up to my room to work the equations. While Daisy Mae watched us with wide eyes from the pillow on my bed and Chipper from his upside-down perch on the window curtains, Quentin read each procedure aloud from Miss Riley’s book, his bony finger running along from equation to equation.

  The book described the phenomenon that dictated rocket-nozzle design, and Quentin and I talked about it until we were certain we understood it. When rocket propellant burned, it first produced a river of gas that flowed into the convergent section of the nozzle. If the river continued through the throat at less than sonic speed—that is to say, less than the speed of sound—it became compacted in the divergent section, bound in turmoil, and inefficient. But if the gas river reached the speed of sound at the throat (“The key to nozzle design, Sonny!”), then the gas flow in the divergent section would go supersonic, a very good thing. The series of equations we needed to work described the parameters of thrust coefficient, nozzle-throat area, combustion-chamber cross-sectional areas, and velocity of the gases predicted for any particular propellant.

  The book also called for us to make decisions we’d never made before: How high and fast was our rocket to go, and how heavy was our payload going to be? We understood that the questions were related. The first thing Quentin and I did was scratch any payload from consideration. We were committed to the glory of pure altitude. “Let’s go for two miles,” Quentin said.

  “Why not thirty?” I demanded.

  Quentin was more cautious. “Let’s just see what it takes to double our altitude,” he said.

  I opened a desk drawer and pulled out a pad of notebook paper. The same equation we’d used to calculate altitude based on time was the one we needed first, good old S = ½at2.

  I did the calculations, assuming our rocket reached maximum velocity immediately upon launch and rounding off the altitude to ten thousand feet. The result equaled a velocity of eight hundred feet per second, or 545.45 miles per hour. When I recalculated, I came up with the same result. This was more than five times faster than the Buick could do on Little Daytona, and I found it difficult to imagine one of our rockets could really go that fast. I shoved the notebook away and threw down my pencil. “This can’t be right.” I was disgusted. I couldn’t even do the first simple equation.

  Quentin took a quick look and pushed the notebook back to me. “It is exactly correct. Keep going. Don’t lose your nerve.”

  “I haven’t lost my nerve!” I snapped. But I had. The next step was to do the equations for the design of the De Laval nozzle, and privately I quaked at the thought of attempting them. There were dozens of them, intricate, enmeshed, one building on the other—one wrong, all wrong. “You had the calculus class, Quentin. You wo
rk them.”

  “No,” he said adamantly. “Miss Riley gave you the book. You know calculus as well as I do. Quit stalling!”

  My confidence was gone. Doing those equations was like running a four-minute mile—something possible only for someone far greater than I.

  Quentin leaned forward and shook his finger at me. “Listen, old man, if you don’t work these equations, what will be the point of all we’ve done? We might end up building a good rocket that’ll fly just fine, and all the grown-ups and teachers will brag on us. Who knows? We might even be able to bluff our way past the judges at the science fair. But you’ll know and I’ll know—all the boys will know—what could have been done if you hadn’t lost your nerve. We could have built a great rocket.”

  “What’s your definition of a great rocket?” I asked.

  He crossed his arms and jutted out his chin. “One that does precisely what it’s designed to do. It doesn’t matter if it only flies two hundred feet. If that’s what it’s designed to do, and that’s what it does, it will be a great rocket.” He pointed at the book. “We want our rocket to go to an altitude of precisely two miles. The equations to make that happen are in that book. Do them!”

  I looked at the tiny letters and signs in the equations. These were the same equations used by Wernher von Braun and seemed intimate, secretive, his domain. The first equation I needed to do was the one that defined the thrust coefficient. Quentin reached across me and tapped it impatiently. “Are we going to sit here all night?”

  “All right, you sonuvabitch, I’ll do it,” I growled. Quentin sat back and laughed.

  The sheets of notebook paper slowly began to fill with my scrawled calculations. For two hours I worked, interrupted only by my mother bringing Quentin and incidentally me some milk and cookies. I got out a straightedge, a protractor, and a compass and carefully drew the nozzle and the casement to the dimensions I had calculated. “Well, here’s something,” I announced when I was done. I felt achy, my arm muscles and fingers sore from my precise drawings.