Homer Hickam - Rocket Boys

On the weekend before I left, I heard Mom pester him about whether he had told the company that he was moving to Myrtle Beach. “I’ve got to wait until the strike’s over, Elsie,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want the union to think they ran me off.”

Mom seemed to accept that explanation but I was suspicious. For one thing, since when did Dad care what the union thought? For another, I couldn’t imagine Dad leaving without choosing and thoroughly training his replacement. To do that, he’d have to let the company know his plans as early as possible. I also hadn’t heard a single peep from the gossip fence about my parents moving. I knew Mom hadn’t talked about it, because she considered it a private matter. But it just didn’t seem possible that Dad hadn’t said something to somebody at the mine about it. Just one little comment would have had the fence buzzing, but all was quiet or one of the boys would have mentioned it to me. So what did Dad really plan on doing? I was too busy to do anything but wonder.

On the night before I was to leave for Indianapolis, Quentin spent the night at my house, not letting me sleep, drilling me incessantly on the details of the trigonometry, calculus, physics, chemistry, and differential equations we used for our rocket designs. Finally, at about three in the morning, I collapsed on my bed and pulled the pillow over my ears. “No more, Q,” I begged. “For the love of God, no more.”

Through the pillow, I heard him clear his throat. “Is it your plan, then, Sonny my boy, to disgrace the entire state of West Virginia with your confounded ignorance?”

I pulled the pillow away. “Again,” I sighed.

“That’s the style!” he said brightly. “All right, old chap. An easy one. Define specific impulse.”

“Specific impulse is defined as the thrust in pounds of a given propellant divided by its consumption rate.”

“And what good is knowing that?”

I let out a long breath. “It’s a means of determining the relative merits of propellants. By using the number denoting the specific impulse, calculations can be made to determine the exhaust velocity of a rocket and ultimately its overall performance.”

“Good. Now, what do we mean by the weight flow coefficient?”

I let out a groan, stared up at the ceiling, and kept talking. Compared to Quentin, Indianapolis had to be a snap.

THE big Trailways bus at the Welch station accepted my panels and boxes of hardware in its yawning luggage bays. The boys, Mom and Dad, Mr. Caton, Mr. Ferro, Mr. Dubonnet, Melba June, and Mr. Turner were all there to see me off. Basil was there too, scribbling furiously. The Welch Daily News had stolen a bit of his thunder with an article about us and our science-fair wins. Basil was determined to outdo the bigger paper by the use of adjectives alone, if necessary.

Emily Sue was also there. She made me open my suitcase and show her my new blue suit. She chucked me on the shoulder like a boy and said, “I guess you’ll at least look good.”

Just for a moment, I thought I saw Geneva Eggers in the back of the crowd, but when I looked again, I couldn’t see her. Dorothy wasn’t there either, of course, and I hadn’t expected her to be. Melba June gave me a kiss right on my mouth in front of my mother, making me turn nearly purple with embarrassment. “Go get ’em, tiger,” she grinned.

Just before I climbed aboard the bus, I was happy to see Jake roll up in his Corvette. I was even happier to see Miss Riley in the passenger seat. Jake got out and clapped me on the shoulder. “Heard you’ve been doing great things, Sonny. I had to come back to see you off. You know this lady?”

I went over to Miss Riley. She opened the car door and I knelt beside her when she didn’t make any move to get out. I wondered if she was feeling tired again. “Show them what West Virginians can do, Sonny,” she said, holding her hand out to me.

“Yes, ma’am!” I promised, shaking her hand. We looked at each other, and she pulled me in and gave me a big hug.

Mom patted me on my arm at the door of the bus. “Good boy,” she said. Dad shook my hand without comment, scowling because he had just caught sight of Mr. Dubonnet. The two were taking turns giving each other dirty looks as my bus pulled out.

I sank back into my seat and the bus rolled through the night. I slept through most of it and awoke at first light and was startled when I couldn’t see any mountains, just a flat plain as far as I could see. I almost felt naked. We arrived in the city around noon, and I unloaded my displays at the cavernous Indiana Exposition Hall. I was directed to an area on the outer edge of the displays with other exhibitors of propulsion projects. I made a quick inspection of their displays and was relieved to find that none of them approached the sophistication of the BCMA’s designs. A lantern-jawed boy from Lubbock, Texas, set up beside me. He was wearing a cowboy hat. He had two designs, one of them using plumbing hardware for rocket nozzles, the other a demonstration of an electromagnetic launcher, with little colored lights that ran the length of a track, that sent a little ball bearing flying off at a pretty good clip. We became instant friends. His name was Orville, but he asked me to call him “Tex.”

Tex gave me some news, and it wasn’t good: “We ain’t gonna win nothing up here, Sonny. Look around. All the prizes go to the big, expensive projects.”

Feeling small and lost in the huge hall amidst all the hurrying people going to and fro, I walked with Tex through the other displays and saw what he meant. Most of them were huge, complex, and obviously very expensive. One of them even featured two monkeys in a self-contained biosphere complete with oxygen-generating plants and a food-pellet delivery mechanism. I had never seen a live monkey before, and here were two in, of all things, a science-fair display. THE WAY TO MARS, it proclaimed. I was stunned. The boys and girls who built them were, I realized, the competition we West Virginia kids were going to have to face once we went out into the world. All of a sudden, my future seemed cloudy and my shiny new nozzles crude.

“Most of these monster displays are from New York or Massachusetts.” Tex shrugged. “Lots of money involved, and these guys are just plain smart anyway. Something else too. The judges don’t like rocket projects. They figure them to be too dangerous. I knew when I came up here I didn’t have a chance to win anything.”

“Then why’d you come?” I blurted out. I could feel the likelihood of ever getting a trophy in the Big Creek display case evaporating.

“Because it’s fun. You’ll see.”

Tex was right. It was fun. He and I wowed the people who came to see our exhibits, telling them about our studies and what it was like to fire off a real rocket. I used my hands a lot and made big, whooshing noises. It was as if I were an actor on a stage, and I found I enjoyed the attention as long as people didn’t press in too close. I had that West Virginia need for a certain amount of space between me and a stranger. I noted to Tex that we always had crowds around our displays, more than most of the big, expensive projects. “Sure, we’re popular,” Tex said, “but that won’t impress the judges.”

The judges were to make their review on the fourth day of the fair. The night before the third day, we were all treated to a big dinner and then packed off to our hotel rooms. Tex and I had already swapped with our assigned roommates and were sharing a room. We walked the streets of Indianapolis, which seemed to me a huge metropolis with cars whizzing past and crowds on the street—friendly, but too many of them for me to feel comfortable. I also felt a vague discomfort at the space around me, and then I realized I was missing the mountains. In West Virginia, they were always there, setting real, physical boundaries between the towns and the people. In Indianapolis, people from anywhere could just come up and bump into you.