Homer Hickam - Rocket Boys

I told Tex what I was feeling and he laughed. “Man, you should come to Texas if you want to know about flat.” He told me about life in Texas and I told him more about West Virginia. When I finished, he said I worried him. “You’re not up here just to compete in a science fair,” he said. “You’re up here to win for all those people back in your little town. What are you going to do when you come back empty-handed?” He shook his head. “Man-oh-man. I’m gonna have to think about this one.”

The next morning, Tex and I got off the bus to stand in front of our displays for another day of fun. To my astonishment, I found my nozzles, casements, and nose cones gone.

I just couldn’t understand it. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for it. How could they be gone? Who could have taken them and why? Tex came over. “You didn’t lock up your stuff?”

“I didn’t know I was supposed to!” I cried, my voice nearly cracking.

“Where are you from, Sonny? Oh, yeah. West Virginia, I almost forgot.” He showed me the wooden case he’d brought with him and the lock on it. “This is a city. You lock up everything.” He gave me a sympathetic look. “You need to report this to security. Come on. I’ll take you.”

When we finally found a guard, he heard me out and then said there had been a bunch of kids who had come in the night before. They had probably swiped my things. I heard what he was saying, but I couldn’t believe it. “But why would they do that?” I asked.

The guard looked at me. “Where are you from, son?”

“West Virginia,” Tex said as if that explained everything, and I guess it did.

I went back, despairing, to my display. I still had the pictures of all the rocket boys, Miss Riley and the physics class, the machine shop, Mr. Bykovski, Mr. Ferro, Mr. Caton and all the machinists, the mine tipple, my house, the basement lab with Daisy Mae perched on the washing machine, all there along with my pages of nozzle calculations and my autographed photo of von Braun. I still had O’Dell’s piece of black velvet and Roy Lee’s three-by-five cards. But without the nozzles, casements, and nose cones, my display made no sense. When the judges came tomorrow, I would have nothing to show them. Tex was busy setting up his display. People were starting to come in. I felt paralyzed. Everything that had happened—our rockets, Mr. Bykovski, Cape Coalwood, calculus, even poor Daisy Mae—had all been leading up to this judgment, and now, even though I already knew I wasn’t going to win, I had this terrible sense of a chain of inevitable events leading toward some conclusion being broken. “Tex, what am I going to do?” I cried.

Tex stopped working on his display and came over. He took off his cowboy hat and scratched his head. “Reckon that little town of yours has a telephone?”

I had never made a long-distance call in my life. Tex took me to a phone booth and I dialed zero and told the operator the number and yes, this was a collect call. Mom answered and I told her what had happened. She was speechless. “Mom, I’ve got to get more rocket stuff somehow, Could you talk to Dad or somebody?”

There was a long pause at the other end. “Sonny, the strike’s gotten even uglier this week. Some union men chased a foreman off mine property yesterday. Tag’s up at the tipple now, guarding it. Your dad’s threatening to go punch John Dubonnet in the nose. I heard him tell Clyde the company might call in the state police.”

I was desperate. “Mom, I need help.”

She sighed. “I’ll do what I can.”

I felt suddenly foolish and selfish. Here she was telling me the whole town was falling apart, that my dad and Mr. Dubonnet were about to get in a fistfight, and that maybe the state police were going to come in, and I was whining that I wanted my rocket stuff. “Mom,” I said, struggling against the part of me that wanted to scream, cry, and beg, “it’s okay. Honest. I’m sorry I called.”

“No, no, Sonny,” she said. “You’re right to call. I’ll see what I can do. But I’m not promising anything, you understand?”

I hung up and went back to my display. People glanced my way and kept going to the other contestants. I found a box and sat down on it. Anyway, I thought, Tex was right. Nobody in the propulsion area was going to win anything. I would just have to go home and accept the fence-line gossip that I’d been too big for my britches and got what had been coming to me, sort of like my dad all these years.

That night, Tex answered the hotel phone and called me. It was Mom. “Can you get to the Trailways bus station in Indianapolis by eight o’clock in the morning?”

My heart skipped a beat. “I think so.”

“There will be a box aboard it for you.”

“What happened?”

She laughed, but to me it didn’t have a happy ring to it. “Sonny, let it wait for another time.”

The next morning, I put on my blue suit and my cardinal tie and had my first taxi ride. After I picked up the wooden crate addressed to me at the bus station, I told the driver I was in a hurry and we went careening through the streets as if we were in the Indianapolis 500. We skidded to a halt in front of the exhibition center, and the driver helped me with the box and we went running to my display area. Tex came over and helped me set up, and I reached in my pocket to pay the driver. He had been looking at my photos and shook his head. “I’m from West Virginia,” he said. “You don’t owe me a thing except to do good!”

“Got a surprise for you, Sonny,” Tex said, his eyes widening a bit at my tie. “I been talking to the committee that runs this thing.” He nodded to the other boys and girls in the propulsion-display area and they grinned back at us. “All of us did while you were worrying over your stuff. We told ’em if we didn’t get a fair shake, we were going to protest, make up signs and parade around just like students do over in Europe and Japan. Scared ’em so much they agreed to put propulsion in our own little separate category.”

I was astonished. “Tex, I hope you win!” I blurted out, and then was pleasantly surprised to find I actually felt that way.

Tex looked at my nozzles, nose cones, and casements. “Yours is the class act here, Sonny. Go get ’em.” He paused. “Gawd, I love that tie. Where’d you get it?”

Less than an hour later, a dozen adults marched into our area. They were the judges. One of them was a young man who spoke in a Germanic accent. I was flabbergasted when he said he was on von Braun’s team. “You mean you actually know Wernher von Braun?” I gasped. I couldn’t imagine that. It was like being interviewed by St. Paul or somebody out of the Bible.

He laughed. “I work with him every day.” Then he started asking me hard questions. I was ready, my pitch rolling off my tongue. My interpretation of the definitions of specific impulse and mass ratio especially seemed to impress him.

When the other judges were finished with me, the young man turned and said, “You know Dr. von Braun’s here today, don’t you?”

My mouth dropped open. “No, sir! Where?”

He waved vaguely toward the center of the auditorium. “I saw him last over by the biological-display area.”

“Tex, will you watch my stuff?”

Tex laughed. “Sure. Get an autograph for me!”

I took off in search of the great man himself. I wandered the aisles, getting myself lost, asking people if Dr. von Braun was nearby. Always, it seemed, I had just missed him. An hour later, defeated, I returned to my display. Tex regarded me sadly. “Man, I hate to tell you, but he was just here. He picked up that nozzle, Sonny.” Tex pointed at the special contoured one Mr. Caton had reproduced, “He said it was a marvelous design and wished he could meet the boy who built it.”