October Sky: Chapter 22–Epilogue

Mr. Bundini was a gentleman reminiscent of Mr. Van Dyke, but he also brought with him more bad news from the steel company.

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.

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

For two hours I worked, interrupted only by my mother bringing Quentin and incidentally me some milk and cookies.

“I forgot how to do it when they’re fractions,” I said defensively.
“You use logarithms, you twit! How could you forget that?”

“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?”

The principal of Welch High School, a tedious man, keeps wanting to make a wager on the science fair.

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.”

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.

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

Sherman and I crawled on our bellies, pushing in front of us our makeshift armor of corrugated tin taken from the blockhouse roof.

I couldn’t believe their calm. I was shaking with both anger and apprehension. Somebody had shot at us!

She looked wan and her eyes were puffy.

It had been ingrained in me by my mother to never poke my nose into anybody’s business.

“I don’t know. Hodgkin’s Disease can go into remission. That means I’ll still have it, but I won’t be sick. Right now, I’m holding my own.”

“I’m sorry you lost your rocket stuff,” he told me, truly contrite.

Quentin and I did most of the talking, boisterously proclaiming how difficult the calculations were and describing how our rockets flew.

Basil’s effusive prose summoned our audience:
The BCMA will be launching from their Cape Coalwood this Saturday. It is a thing of glory to see, all right.

Your reporter has already posted their adventures in this space, but it is worth repeating that just about anything can happen at one of their blastoffs, as witness the one where two of our intrepid boys crept out under the cover of swiftly manufactured armor....

I had decided to line the interior of the nozzle with a veneer of water putty, an inspiration that I hoped would act as an ablative heat sink.

A bus passed us. HUBERT HUMPHREY FOR PRESIDENT was emblazoned on its side.

The lights from the gas station burnished his sleek black hairdo.

I didn’t have time to traipse over to Welch for clothes.

I gawked at it every time I saw it. It was too imposing for a Coalwood boy.

Every day I honed my spiel a little more so that I could quickly deliver a learned presentation on the mathematics of the design of De Laval nozzles, the calculations of specific impulse and mass ratios, and the trigonometry of altitudes needed for an amateur rocketry test range.

Every day I honed my spiel a little more so that I could quickly deliver a learned presentation on the mathematics of the design of De Laval nozzles, the calculations of specific impulse and mass ratios, and the trigonometry of altitudes needed for an amateur rocketry test range.

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.

“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.”

I stepped off the bus in Bluefield to a sea of familiar faces accompanied by applause and cheers, brandishing the surprise medal I had garnered.

I stepped off the bus in Bluefield to a sea of familiar faces accompanied by applause and cheers, brandishing the surprise medal I had garnered.

“I’m not a religious man, Sonny. You want parables and proverbs, go to church. But I believe there’s a plan for each of us—you, me, Freida too. It doesn’t help to get mad about it or want to whip up on God about it. It’s just the way it is. You’ve got to accept it.”

Tag seemed everywhere, shooing the curious away from us, turning cars around that violated his single-file parking dictum.

We ran up our flag. It was the same one O’Dell’s mom had made for us nearly three years before, a little tattered but still serviceable. Wind was negligible.

The crowd, still growing, took no notice of its problems and clapped and yelled exuberantly as it disappeared.

Auk XXX vaulted off the pad similarly, its parabola drifting up to twenty-three thousand feet.

The thunderous din didn’t stop.

In his church, Little Richard raced to the belfry and began to toll the bell in celebration.

I became aware of movement beside me, and I was astonished to see Dad prancing along the slack, waving his old hat in his hand. He was exulting to the sky. “Beautiful! Beautiful!”

The medical answer was what I expected to hear: Dad had suffocated, the macroscopic coal and rock dust that clogged his lungs finally denying him even a scintilla of air.

Even now, Coalwood endures, and no one, nor careless industry or overzealous government, can ever completely destroy it—not while we who once lived there may recall our life among its places, or especially remember rockets that once leapt into the air, propelled not by physics but by the vibrant love of an honorable people, and the instruction of a dear teacher, and the dreams of boys.