The Mountain Cage (23 page)

Victoria set down her cup of coffee and gazed at the image of Venus on her laptop. “Leave it to a female,” she went on, “to get the simplest things ass-backwards.” This was a reference to Venus’s retrograde motion, to the fact that it turned on its axis from east to west. That Uranus also rotated in a retrograde direction was ignored in that particular joke. Once Venus, the brilliant morning and evening star, had been seen as a celestial embodiment of female beauty. Now she seemed to represent, for some, female peculiarities, eccentricities, and just plain orneriness.

“I think I’ve heard them all by now,” Hillary said. She and Victoria sat at the small table where the astronauts ate their meals. The constant thrust of the
Sacajawas’s
engines provided the one-g gravitational effect that kept their coffee in their cups and their butts in their chairs; they would not have to deal with the weightlessness of free fall until they were in orbit around Venus.

Victoria looked up from her computer. “Look, after this trip, we’ll probably each get a Venusian crater named after us.”

A crater called Rodham, Hillary thought. That was something to look forward to, as long as her crater didn’t become yet another joke.

To pursue her goal of becoming an astronaut had meant standing up to her father. Hugh Rodham had not been an easy man to defy. He had died almost six years ago, and Hillary still felt that loss deeply, but her father had also been a hard and unbending man.

“So,” Hugh Rodham had said to her at Wellesley, “you’ve made up your mind about what school you’re going to next fall.”

“Yes,” Hillary said. They were in her dormitory room, packing up her things. Her father had driven the long distance from Chicago to Wellesley to see her graduate, leaving her mother with her brothers Tony and Hugh, Jr. in Park Ridge.

“Heard you’re going to some conference in Washington soon. Young leaders of the future, they called it, whatever that means.” Her solidly Republican father sounded suspicious, as if she had been invited to join some sort of leftist cabal.

“It’s sponsored by the League of Women Voters, Dad.” One of the reporters who had interviewed her after her speech must have told him before she could. She had decided to go, even though the event seemed designed largely for young people who aspired to political careers. She might meet some people who could one day help her at NASA. Politics had its uses.

“More money in being a doctor,” he said, “than in what you plan to do.” She thought of the game they had played when she was a child, when her father had tutored her in the statistical mysteries of the Chicago
Tribune’s
stock quotations and had drilled her in how to choose good investments. “Going to medical school, or even law school, would make more practical sense if you have to have a career. You were talking about being a doctor all last year.”

It was true. Hillary had temporarily lost sight of her goal during the tumult of 1968, with its shocking assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the rioting in Chicago during the Democratic convention, when she had gone into the city by train only to witness kids her age being beaten by police. The wounds inflicted on society by such tragedy and disorder, especially on the poor and disenfranchised who had so few to fight for their interests, were intolerable to her. She would go to medical school, perhaps at Harvard or Yale, and specialize in pediatrics. She would set up a clinic in the inner city, perhaps in one of the Chicago neighborhoods she had visited with the Reverend Donald Jones and the youth group of Park Ridge’s United Methodist Church. Her patients would be the impoverished urban blacks and migrant workers for whom she and her more fortunate friends had organized baby-sitting pools and food drives.

But such musings had been only a brief detour from her long-held aim. Doing medical and biochemical research was also a way to help people, and if she became an astronaut someday, she would have a public forum—a bully pulpit of sorts—from which she could inspire others to do the good works that could change society.

“More money in being a doctor,” her father repeated as he sat down on one of the beds.

“Maybe so, but I’ve been offered a real opportunity—I have to grab it. Things are changing, Dad.”

“Things are changing, all right, and not always for the better. Dick Nixon would have had an honorable peace with victory, not this namby-pamby time-to-reach-out-and-rebuild crapola. You wouldn’t have seen Nixon and Agnew acting like Humphrey and Muskie, running around the country apologizing to a lot of long-haired kids for—”

“Dad,” Hillary said, keeping her temper in check, “I don’t want to talk about politics.” Politics by itself, she had finally concluded, would not solve anything. President Humphrey, with all his talk of reconciliation, would be getting nowhere without the promise of technological feats that would mark the beginning of a new age. Businesses with new technologies would create new wealth; people would lift their gaze from this small planet to what lay beyond it.

Only such a dream could rouse what was best in her species. Only the prospect of great technological advances, and the wealth they would produce for everyone, could keep her country from tearing itself apart. At last the rich and powerful might be able to reach out to the less fortunate without having to fear the loss of what they had. The wretched of the world would have a true hope of improving their lot.

“You’re stubborn, Hillary,” her father said. “You won’t change your mind, I can see that.” He had said the same thing when his once Republican daughter had come home from college and declared herself a Democrat.

Hillary sat down next to him and put her hand on his arm. “You’ll be proud of me. Where I’m going—it’s a great school. I’ll be one of the first women to get a degree there.”

“Must not be much of a school, then. Maybe they lowered their standards.”

Hugh Rodham had always belittled her and her brothers that way. “Must be an easy school you go to,” he had muttere d while perusing her report card of straight A’s. “Must not be much of a college,” he had said when she was accepted at Wellesley. His words had spurred her on instead of discouraging her; she had understood what he really meant: It’s hard out there. The world is a tough place, and it’s my job to make you tough enough to deal with it. Being second-best isn’t good enough; you’d better aim high.

“Dad,” she said softly, “you’re talking about Caltech. I couldn’t have done any better. And Caltech doesn’t lower standards for anybody.”

Venus was a world of volcanoes. They ranged from small shield volcanoes built up slowly by repeated flows of lava to huge shield volcanoes that were hundreds of miles across. Some were flat-topped pancake domes with steep sides, while still others, unique to Venus, were circular coronae surrounded by rings of fractures and ridges.

“Here’s the deal,” Victoria Cho had explained to the reporters at the first press conference for the
Sacajawea’s
crew. “Like, some ninety per cent of the surface of Venus is volcanoes. You’ve got a bigger variety of volcanic forms there than anywhere else in the solar system. You’ve got these big Hawaiian-style jobs like Sapas Mons, and then you’ve got these features we call coronae that aren’t like anything on Earth— the coronae are those big circular forms you see on the screen behind me. Some of them have lava flows spreading out, some have shield volcanoes inside them. Most of these coronae aren’t so big, but there’s a few like Artemis Corona that are way humongous—about fifteen hundred miles across. And in addition to all this serious weirdness, you’ve got these big impact craters that look as if somebody just plopped them down there at the last minute—the last minute, in geological terms, meaning less than a billion years ago.”

Victoria folded her arms. “Now about ten per cent of the Venusian surface is this weird terrain we call tesserae, those bizarre, rugged deformed-looking expanses of really wrinkled land, and they’re the oldest places on the surface of Venus. It’s like the rest of the planet got flooded by lava from volcanoes, and the tesserae are islands. So here’s what I want to know. Did the whole surface look like that once, all deformed by tectonic activity, or is it just that the tesserae are so old that they’re, like, all cracked and wrinkled from age?”

As wrinkled as some old hag who’s spent too much time at the beach, Hillary thought, remembering another crack she had overheard among the geologists. Volcanoes erupting from time to time, atmospheric pressure so intense on the Venusian surface that the lower atmosphere of carbon dioxide was suspected to be as much a liquid as a gas, the extreme heat, the poisonous sulfuric acid in the clouds—all of it made her think that giving Venus’s topographic features female names was appropriate. The planet seemed as angry as women ought to be after centuries of male oppression that had often been as oppressive as the Venusian atmosphere. Venus could almost be seen as the planetary manifestation of a just female rage.

Hillary finished testing the crew’s latest blood samples in the
Sacajawea’s
small laboratory, then left the lab. She was in effect the ship’s doctor, given her degrees in biochemistry and the paramedical training she had acquired during her years of training with NASA. Along with some biological experiments, she took blood tests, checked blood pressure, analyzed urine samples, monitored cardiac function, and made other medical tests and observations. She did not expect to see any signs of calcium loss or muscle atrophy until they were in orbit around Venus and again weightless, but they were not likely to be in free fall long enough for any such loss to become significant.

Hillary’s cubicle was a small chamber aft that was about the size of a large closet. Inside were a narrow bed, a flat wall screen on which she could call up movies, television programs, and other visual material from the
Sacajawea’s
databases, and a sound system on which she could listen to selections from the ship’s music library. She let the door slide shut behind her and stretched out on the bed, then impulsively reached inside her pocket for her devotional.

The crew of the
Sacajawea
had been allowed to bring along a few personal items. Among the few possessions Hillary had aboard were a Chicago Cubs baseball cap, some favorite photos of her daughter Chelsea Michelle, and her pocket Methodist devotional of Scriptural passages.

Hillary had been carrying a devotional with her ever since her teen years, when Donald Jones, her church’s youth minister, had opened the eyes of his privileged white charges to the unfairness and cruelty of the world. He had believed that a true Christian had to be involved with the world. Overcoming alienation, searching for and giving meaning to modern life—that was the way to redemption; doing good works and ministering to the troubled and less fortunate was her duty.

She had done what she could, venturing out of the citadels of Wellesley and Caltech to tutor children in Boston’s Roxbury and Los Angeles’s Watts, helping to organize a medical clinic and child care program for some of Houston’s working poor. Always she had felt that she could have done more, that she had compromised, that she had often placed too much importance on worldly things. Still, if she had not taken some trouble to make what had turned out to be lucrative investments, her husband, always oblivious to petty economic concerns, would have done little to provide them with more security. The dream of space had drawn her, but also the knowledge that, as an astronaut, she would be able to touch more lives and have a greater public forum. She had drifted away from her childhood faith, but it had helped in forming her, in making her feel her obligation to others.

Her husband had never understood her spiritual beliefs, such as they were. To him, science and religion were adversaries. “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing,” he had often said. “It’s better to live not knowing than to have an answer that might be wrong. I don’t know how you can think this whole universe is just some stage where some God’s watching people struggle with good and evil. Doubting, admitting our ignorance—those are our tools as scientists.”

They had argued about a lot of things. She had almost always lost the arguments, but went down fighting. Now she would give anything to be able to argue with him again. Hillary closed her eyes for a moment and felt the pain of his loss once more.

Unedited interview with Rita Bedosky by Jane Pauley for “The Voyage of the
Sacajawea
,” report to be aired February 11, 1998 on “Dateline NBC.”

RITA BEDOSKY: You are going to edit this?

JANE PAULEY: Yes, of course.

RB: You’ll have to—my friends say I’m kind of a motormouth.

JP (clears throat): We’re speaking to Dr. Rita Bedosky, who was one of astronaut Hillary Rodham’s closest friends when they were both graduate students at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Bedosky is now a professor of physics at American University in Washington, D.C.

RB: Which is kind of weird, when you consider it. I always thought that if one of us was going to end up in Washington, it’d be Hillary. She was always more political than most of us.

JP: She organized the first Caltech women’s group, didn’t she?

RB: Sure did, and we sure as hell needed one. There were so few of us back then—we really relied on those once-a-week meetings for moral support. First it was just the grad students, but when they started admitting women as undergraduates, we were there to look out for them. And it was Hillary who saw that we could have some valuable allies if we brought in the secretaries and office workers and the cafeteria staff and the cleaning women. With all those Caltech guys, we women had to stick together.