Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  Quentin replaced me at my desk. He put his head down and went line by line through my pages of calculations. After an hour of it, he threw the notebook across the room. “You rounded off the powers,” he accused. “Your drawings are worthless.”

  “I forgot how to do it when they’re fractions,” I said defensively.

  “You use logarithms, you twit! How could you forget that?”

  Exasperated at my stupidity, I looked up at the ceiling and moaned. “Logarithms!” I was so tired. I just wanted to lay my head down and go to sleep.

  “Get back to work!” Quentin snarled.

  I could have slugged him, but I sighed instead, got out the differential-equations book with the log tables in them, and went back through all the equations. Daisy Mae got off the bed and crawled up in my lap. She nuzzled my arm and then curled up, occasionally reaching out a paw and touching my chest to let me know she was there. Quentin fell asleep and was soon snoring. After the math, I did the drawings again. Mom had given up calling us to supper. Quentin rose from the bed, stretching and yawning, and again perused my work. Then he carefully stacked the notebook pages, squared them off, patted them, and looked at me out of the tops of his eyes in that significant way he had. “Prodigious work, Sonny.”

  “You think so?” I said it quietly, but I wanted to shout to the sky my relief.

  “I think this is going to be a great rocket.”

  “Let’s show it to Mom,” I said. Dad was at the mine and, anyway, I didn’t figure he’d care to see what we’d done.

  Quentin and I carried the sheath of papers and drawings to her. She was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping coffee, and looking over the new Sears, Roebuck catalog. She put it aside to look at our work. While she did so, Quentin’s stomach growled audibly. “What now, boys?” she said after giving each page a careful inspection.

  “We’re going to build a great rocket, Mrs. Hickam,” Quentin told her.

  “Before you do that, how about some supper?” she asked him. “Pork chops, brown beans, corn on the cob, and biscuits sound good to you?”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  Mom said it was too late for Quentin to hitch home, so he again spent the night with us. I think she just wanted him around. While I watched television, the two of them sat at the kitchen table, talking about this and that. Later, I camped out as always on the couch. Dad came in late and went straight upstairs to bed. I resisted the urge to show him my work.

  The following Monday I carried my calculations to Mr. Hartsfield. “For a boy who couldn’t do simple algebra,” he said after carefully studying the pages, apparently never going to forget my original mathematical sins, “I must tell you I’m impressed. Now, I ask you: What will you do with this? Blow yourself up?”

  “No, sir.”

  He smiled, a facial expression I didn’t know he had. “I believe you.”

  I carried the design to Miss Riley, looking for even more approval. I found her in her classroom at lunch, grading papers. It seemed to me she had come back to school in the fall looking pale and thin. Her eyes, always bright, seemed to be strangely shadowed. Still, she seemed to be having a wonderful time our senior year teaching us physics, using her tiny salary to buy things to demonstrate her lesson of the day: Boyle’s Law (a balloon), Archimedes’s Principle (flat iron and wooden toy boat), centripetal and centrifugal forces (a yo-yo). The class soaked up everything she had to teach. She looked over my work and praised it. I glowed. “Have you thought about the science fair?”

  “We’re going for it.”

  She pulled a tissue from a box on her desk and blew her nose. “Excuse me.” She tucked her wool scarf closer to her neck.

  “Are you okay, Miss Riley?” I asked, worried for her.

  “Just a cold. I always get them this time of year. Come on, let’s show Mr. Turner what you’ve done.”

  Miss Riley escorted me to the principal’s office, and I spread the drawings and equations out on his desk. “An impressive pipe bomb, to be sure,” he mused. “I heard you assaulted a softball field in Coalwood a few weeks back. Were there any casualties?”

  “No, sir. Well, apart from old Mr. Carson stepping in the hole we had to dig to get it out. He was wandering around in the dark for some reason and sprained his ankle.”

  “In the queer mass of human destiny, the determining factor has always been luck,” Mr. Turner observed, raising one eyebrow to Miss Riley.

  “Yes, sir,” I said back in confusion.

  “The McDowell County Science Fair is in March. Miss Riley believes you should be allowed to represent the school with your … devices. The county judges, none of whom believes this school capable of turning out anything but football players, will question you rigorously on your project. They will suspect that you are merely standing in front of a project that your teachers or your parents have actually built. Are you prepared to answer tough questions?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right then. Let’s give you an oral exam. What makes a rocket fly?”

  “Newton’s third law. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

  He stabbed the drawing of the nozzle. “And this peculiar shape? What’s it for?”

  “That is a De Laval nozzle. It’s designed to convert slow-moving, high-pressure gases into a stream of low-pressure, high-velocity gases. If the gases reach sonic velocity at the throat, they will go supersonic in the diverging part of the nozzle, producing maximum thrust.”

  “You see?” Miss Riley said, grinning.

  “You taught him all this, Freida?”

  “No, sir. He taught it to himself.”

  Mr. Turner drummed his fingers on the polished surface of his desk and studied my calculations, slowly turning the pages. “The principal of Welch High School, a tedious man, keeps wanting to make a wager on the science fair. Says he needs the money. It’s your decision, Freida. You want this young man to enter, make sure he gets his entry form completed in time.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  As we walked back to her classroom, students thronged the hall, the metallic ringing of lockers opening and closing as they gathered their books for the first class after lunch. Dorothy passed us, walking with Sandy Whitt, the head cheerleader. Sandy gave us a cheerful grin and wave. Dorothy nodded. I very pointedly said hello only to Sandy. After we climbed the steps to the third floor, Miss Riley stopped and leaned tiredly against the wall. “I don’t know where my energy is these days,” she said, waving away my concern when I reached out to help her. She felt her neck, adjusted her scarf, and then smiled at me with a faint sadness. “By the way, if you see Jake, tell him I said hello and he still owes me that ride to Bluefield.”

  Jake had been called back to Ohio during the summer. He’d left his telescope on the roof for us boys to use, but I wasn’t certain he was coming back to Coalwood. I told her I’d keep an eye out for his Corvette at the Club House, and that seemed to be enough for her. We went back to her room. She seemed grateful to sit down.

  WHEN I turned in the drawings based on my scientific calculations to Mr. Ferro, he studied them, asked a few questions, and then called in Mr. Caton to do the work. I rode my bike down to the shop every day after school to inspect how he was doing and sweep up the tailings at the machines, anything to assist. To speed things up, Mr. Caton fanned some of the work out to other machinists. I would have tried my hand on the lathes and shapers, but the machinists were having none of that—this work required too much precision for my clumsy teenage hands.

  The black phone often rang for me in the evening, usually Mr. Caton working unpaid overtime on the nozzle. The nozzle was tricky, with its two internal angles that had to meet precisely to form the throat diameter I’d specified. Mom came into the foyer as I bantered with him and shook her head. “The acorn doesn’t fall far from the oak, does it, now?”

  When the intricate De Laval nozzle was ready, Mr. Caton proudly displayed his work. “You think Wernher von Braun could use me down a
t Cape Canaveral?”

  I thought he could, but I told Mr. Caton I hoped he wasn’t going to leave.

  “And lose the chance to work for you for nothing?” He laughed, and I noticed for the first time he had a gold tooth.

  We chose Thanksgiving weekend for the big test of our new design. Loading the zincoshine was a labor-intensive process, no more than three inches of propellant compressed at a time in the casement, a drying time of four hours required for each segment. With an inner length of forty-five inches, that meant sixty hours of loading across a week. Before I left for school in the morning, I compressed three inches and then another three when I came in from school, and another before I went to bed. The basement smelled like moonshine, and not a little of its vapors spread through the house. “If you come over,” Mom told the neighbors, “don’t start the rumor I’m running a liquor joint.”

  I used up almost all of my zinc dust loading the Auk XXIII. Getting more was a problem. The BCMA treasury was bare. Still, I wasn’t terribly worried about it. I just had this belief that whenever I needed anything to build my rockets, somehow it was going to be there, provided by the Lord or whatever foolish angels had taken on the BCMA as a project. O’Dell said he’d think about a way to get us some money. I said I hoped it would be something better than digging up cast-iron pipes.

  On the day before Thanksgiving, Dad solemnly waited for each shift at the portal to call out the names of more men to be cut off. A dozen families were moving out of town, leaving more empty houses to stare vacantly when I rode past them on my bike. Coalwood was unsettled, even spiritually. The church had opened anew, this time firmly in the hands of Methodists from north of the Mason–Dixon line, a dangerous combination, my mother said. The new preacher, a wheedling little man who talked through his nose, twittered from the pulpit about the evils of “corporate greed” and men “who did the devil’s bidding.” Pooky Suggs, who hadn’t been to church in twenty years, said this preacher had it right and gathered a group of men around him to announce a wildcat strike. It lasted one shift, the men creeping to work the next day after Mr. Dubonnet told them to get their butts back down in the mine, but Pooky had gotten a whiff of power and was now muttering dissent on the Big Store steps. “Dubonnet and Hickam are in it together,” he declared, passing out his moonshine in fruit jars to the other men. “We got to start lookin’ out for ourselves.”

  Mom roasted a turkey for the holiday, but Dad ate little of it, still obviously upset from having to cut off his men. It was just the three of us around the kitchen table. Jim was home from college, but he had a new girlfriend over in Berwind and had taken the Buick and sped off almost as soon as he deposited his laundry in the basement. He had made first-string on the freshman team, but even that didn’t seem to cheer Dad up much. He pretended to watch football on television for a little while after dinner and then put on his coat and walked up to the mine. Mom went out on the porch, staying there sewing and reading magazines with Daisy Mae on her lap, Dandy at her feet, and Chipper on her shoulder until Dad returned, near midnight. I was in my room, designing more nozzles, when I heard her hurry off to bed. I think she didn’t want him to know she had waited up for him.

  The next weekend, the largest crowd that had ever come to Cape Coalwood showed up, nearly three hundred milling people, even a few from the Welch side of the county. We passed the line of cars that began a quarter of the way to Frog Level with me carrying Auk XXIII across my legs in the backseat of Roy Lee’s car. It was the biggest, heaviest rocket we’d ever built, four feet in length, and I found myself wishing on the drive down that Mr. Bykovski was around to see it, and Mrs. Bykovski too.

  At the Cape, I pressed a cork plug inside the nozzle to hold the Nichrome-wire igniter in place. Some of the new and more curious watchers, not knowing the protocol that had been developed by our steadier customers, came out on the slack to get a better view. I was alarmed to see a few children pull up a log not one hundred feet from the pad, as if they meant to stay there. Sherman went over to shoo them back to the road and then began to round up all the others. Quentin walked downrange to operate the far theodolite, while the rest of us piled inside the blockhouse after running up our flag. We were ready to go.

  I was tense as I began the countdown. Although Quentin was confident, I was a little afraid of this big rocket. I took a deep breath and turned the firing switch on the professional-looking console Billy and Sherman had built.

  With a mighty burst of fire and smoke, Auk XXIII tore off the pad and streaked out of sight, a deep thunder reverberating from mountain to mountain and echoing up the valley. Our audience all looked up after it with their mouths open. So did we boys. If a flock of birds with a sense of humor had flown over at that moment, we might all have suffered. There was no sign of our rocket at all. It had simply vanished. Quentin rang up and reported the same result downrange. A towering funnel of smoke gradually drifted over us. Auk XXIII was up there somewhere. What if it came down on the crowd or on us? What if it went uprange and landed in Coalwood again?

  “I see it!” Billy yelped. Good old sharp-eyed Billy!

  “Where?”

  “There!”

  It was just a dot, but it grew, and it was downrange, although veering toward Rocket Mountain. It hit the top of a big tree, which shivered from the impact as if to let us know it had caught our rocket. Picking up our shovels, we ran down the slack, the crowd cheering us as we went past.

  “Forty-two seconds,” Roy Lee cried breathlessly as we ran.

  “Seven thousand fifty-six feet!” both Quentin and I called out at about the same moment, both of us capable now of working out the calculation in our heads. It was our highest rocket yet, but it wasn’t what my nozzle design had predicted. “What happened?” I worried as we pounded down the slack. “According to the equations, it should have gone three thousand feet higher.”

  “Don’t know,” Quentin puffed. “Have to look at the rocket.”

  Billy led us up the mountain, weaving through the trees and bursting through a line of thick rhododendron into a green glade beneath a ridge. Auk XXIII was buried there, up to its fins in soft, wet loam. O’Dell looked around and held up his hand. “Stop, boys,” he ordered. “Don’t trample this place!”

  We pulled up short. “Why?”

  He dropped to his knees beside a big oak and dug carefully with his shovel, pulling up a gnarly root. “You know what this is?”

  When we all shrugged, he smiled. “Money.”

  “Not another crazy scheme,” Roy Lee groaned.

  “No, this one’s for real. It’s ginseng. This glade’s full of it. I’ve never seen so much!”

  “What the hell’s ginseng?” Roy Lee asked.

  “Indian medicine. People over in Japan and places like that think it cures everything.”

  “How much is it worth?”

  “Well,” he said as he dug up another root. “I don’t think we’re going to have to worry about zinc-dust money for a while.”

  I had vaguely heard of the stuff being dug around the county, but had never actually seen any of it before. I looked at the dirty ginseng specimen O’Dell handed me, thinking of God and whatever angels He had assigned to the BCMA. “The Lord preserves the simple” was Mom’s response when I mentioned this to her.

  Quentin and Sherman were busily digging out the rocket, finally pulling it out of the packed earth. Quentin peered inside the nozzle and then ran his fingers inside it, wiping out the greasy residue. “Erosion! The worst we’ve seen!”

  The throat diameter that I had so carefully calculated and Mr. Caton and his buddies had so precisely machined was now an ugly, oblong, pitted abomination. “It ate 1020 bar stock, burned it out like it was cardboard,” I marveled.

  “We must learn to control this,” Quentin said ominously. “Or we might as well quit.”

  Roy Lee contemplated our sad faces. “Are you two crazy? This rocket just flew almost a mile and a half into the sky. It used to be all our rockets did was la
y down and fart.”

  I poked the tail of the rocket at him. “Just look,” I said, my voice tinged with bitterness. “Erosion!”

  He reached across the rocket and tapped the side of my head. “There’s erosion all right.”

  THERE were several men in Welch who ran ads in the paper for ginseng root and paid good money, so for once one of O’Dell’s schemes paid off. We made enough to buy a full twenty pounds of zinc dust. Auk XXIV was ready three weeks later. It was a stretch version of Auk XXIII, with a foot of length tacked on to see what difference it would make in altitude. Actually, I had added only six inches of zincoshine. The top half foot was filled with a mix of two-thirds sulfur and one-third zinc, tests demonstrating that it produced a slow-burning oily smoke. We hoped it would help with tracking, but it also meant we’d introduced a half-pound payload. That would reduce altitude.

  We tackled the erosion problem too. Mr. Caton inspected the damaged nozzle and suggested a curved throat. It would be more difficult to machine and would require hand polishing, but he was willing to tackle it if I agreed. The theory behind his idea was that the sharp throat I’d designed made for a hot spot along its thin edge. Once melting began, it just kept going, eating out the rest of the throat.

  We had our next launch on the same day as the Big Creek Christmas formal. While other boys across the district were washing their cars and going across the mountain to Welch to pick up corsages for their dates, we rocket boys were down on our hands and knees at Cape Coalwood, worrying over the latest Auk. Only Roy Lee had a date. The rest of us were going stag. I’d put off asking anyone until it was too late, telling myself it didn’t matter because true rocket scientists didn’t have time for such things. “How many times do I have to tell you those old boys don’t do nothing but chase tail?” Roy Lee said, rolling his eyes. “All those women in bikinis strutting around Cape Canaveral, and there’s old Wernher and his boys with their big rockets sticking up in the air. How do you feel when our rockets work?”