Rockets

The report came out in June and the papers ran pieces of it for a week, and on the Thursday they ran the charts.

Not a description of the charts. The charts. Photographed off the pages and printed four to a broadsheet page, small, gray, with a caption underneath saying what each one had been called on the night.

Gene’s father had the paper open on the kitchen table with his coffee going cold beside it, which was how you knew.

“They knew,” he said.

“Who did.”

“The engineers. The night before. They got on the phone and they said don’t.” He turned the page around so it faced the room, which nobody had asked him to do. “It’s all here. This is what they showed them.”

Gene came around and stood behind the chair.

There were thirteen of them. They were typed and they were hand-lettered in places and they had been faxed at some point, so the letters had gone furry at the edges and some of the lines had picked up a stutter. One was titled TEMPERATURE CONCERN ON SRM JOINTS. One was a list. One had a column of numbers down the left and a column of words down the right and a lot of white in the middle. One of them, near the end, said in block capitals that the recommendation was not to launch below fifty-three degrees.

Gene read all thirteen, which took him about six minutes.

“Where’s the part,” he said.

“What part.”

“The part where it says it. The cold and the — where’s the one that shows it.”

His father moved his hand across the page and stopped, and then went back to the beginning and did it again.

They looked for it together for a while. His mother came and stood at the end of the table with a dish towel and looked at it upside down.

It was not there.

Every number was there. The temperature at every previous launch was there, in a list, on one chart. The damage found on the joints was there, in a different list, on a different chart. Both of them were printed in the same newspaper on the same morning nine inches apart.

Nowhere had anyone put the one against the other.

The fourteenth chart was on the last page, and the caption under it said it was not from the night. It had been drawn afterward, for the Commission, in the spring — the same joints, the same history, gone over again with all the time in the world.

It was called HISTORY OF O-RING DAMAGE ON SRM FIELD JOINTS.

It was a row of small drawings.

Somebody had drawn a little rocket for each flight — a stubby cartoon rocket with a nose and a body and two fins, twenty-four of them in a line across the page, and where a flight had damage they had marked the rocket, and where it hadn’t they had left it plain.

They were not to scale and they were not the same size as each other and one or two of them leaned.

Gene’s father looked at that one for a long time.

Then he stood up, picked the paper up off the table with both hands, folded it over once, and put it in the trash under the sink, coffee ring and all, and put the lid down and stood there with his hand on the lid.

“Rob,” Gene’s mother said.

“They drew rockets.”

“I know.”

“Seven people.” He took his hand off the lid. “And that one isn’t even from the night. That one’s from after. They had from January to June, and they knew what it was for, and they sat down and they drew little —”

He went out through the back door and did not slam it, and they heard him get partway across the yard and stop.

That was the summer everybody found out at once.

It went around at a speed that nothing had gone around before, because it was not a thing you had to be told, it was a thing you looked at for four seconds in a newspaper on a kitchen table while somebody’s mother stood at the end of it holding a dish towel.

The papers printed the charts on the Thursday.

They did not print them again.

By the end of the following week the numbers were coming out as tables — plain, ruled, temperature in one column and damage in the next, side by side where anybody could see them — and one of the wire services ran a note apologizing for the earlier presentation, which nobody could remember a newspaper ever doing before.