“Letterman,” Judy said. “That had to be the worst, doing Letterman.”
Hillary wasn’t so sure about that. Exchanging sarcastic ripostes with David Letterman, schmoozing with Jay Leno, Rosie O’Donnell and Barbara Walters, fielding questions from Ted Koppel and Sam Donaldson on “This Week with Diane Sawyer”—none of that had especially bothered her. It was the intrusiveness of many in the media, their refusal to acknowledge that she and her crewmates had any rights to privacy. During the weeks before the mission, when interest in the Sacajawea and her crew was building to a fever pitch, camera crews and reporters had been camping in front of her house in Houston at all hours. Worse still were the newspaper and magazine articles that, to Hillary’s mind anyway, bordered on tabloid journalism. The journalists had ferreted out every personal gossipy detail about her life they could find—how she had met her husband, women who claimed to have had affairs with him during the Seventies, her spiritual beliefs—nothing seemed to be off limits. Even Hillary’s daughter, who had done nothing to deserve such intrusiveness other than to have the parents she did, was not spared garbled reports about her love life and parties she had attended on campus and fellow students she had allegedly dated.
Some of the questions asked of Hillary were, she felt strongly, questions no one should have to answer. She had fielded most of them, evaded the most intrusive inquiries, and consoled herself with the thought that she had fulfilled her responsibilities to NASA’s public relations staff.
“Could be worse,” Jerrie Cobb had told her. Jerrie, the first American woman in space and the first woman to go to the Moon, was old enough to remember when things had been worse. “Could be a lot worse if nobody cared about the space program. We’d have all the privacy we wanted then.”
Hillary could not imagine people being bored by or indifferent to the space program. Her dream might have begun as a teenaged girl’s fantasy, but it had grown into something much larger than herself, humankind’s greatest venture, something that would help make the world a better place. “We are not interested in social reconstruction,” she had said in 1969, as the first student to speak at a Wellesley College commencement, “it’s human reconstruction… If the experiment in human living doesn’t work in this country, in this age, it’s not going to work anywhere.”
That experiment had been working in recent years, not least because of the space program. That, along with ending the war in Vietnam, had been part of President Hubert Humphrey’s legacy; being out from under Lyndon Johnson’s shadow had imbued the former vice-president with a boldness few had previously believed he possessed. By the time Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were on their way to the Moon in July of 1969, the summer after Hillary’s graduation from Wellesley, the safe withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam was proceeding rapidly, Secretary of State Eugene McCarthy was issuing optimistic announcements about the progress of peace talks several times a week, Senator Edward M. Kennedy had cut short his Massachusetts vacation to migrate between Palm Beach, Florida and the Kennedy Space Center making political hay by reminding people of his brother John F. Kennedy’s promise to send men to the Moon, and NASA had announced successful experiments on an ion drive and plans for building reusable shuttlecraft and a permanent space station in Earth orbit.
Hillary’s young life, marred by assassinations, violence, an unpopular war, and the increasing animosity between her generation and that of her parents, had suddenly looked brighter. In the wave of good feeling induced by Secretary McCarthy’s diplomatic successes and the Apollo 11 Moon landing, people again looked ahead. There was even talk that NASA was at long last seriously considering the recruitment of female astronauts. The summer of 1969 had evoked in Hillary the strange and eerie feeling that a bleak future had somehow been averted, that she and her fellow citizens were at last moving away from the darkness that had threatened to overwhelm them toward the light at the end of the tunnel.
* * * *
A year on Venus, the time it took the veiled planet to make one revolution around the sun, was 224.7 Earth days. The time it took Venus to rotate once on its axis was 243 Earth days, making a Venusian day longer than a Venusian year.
“A seriously weird cycle, if you ask me,” Victoria Cho said. “Let’s face it, the whole damned planet has a major case of PMS.” The geologist had apparently heard most of the one-liners about Venus. That much of the humor was sexist didn’t surprise Hillary; NASA had remained a male bastion well into the Seventies. Jerrie Cobb and the first group of women to train as astronauts had not been recruited until early 1977, after President John Glenn’s inauguration, when even the most misogynistic guys in NASA had finally concluded that long sojourns on the planned space stations and lunar outposts almost required the presence of women.
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 Sacajawea’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.”
“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 intolera
ble 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. It’s a great school. I’ll be one of the first women to go 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 muttered 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 the biggest variety of volcanic forms there as 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 begun 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 or 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 portion of 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.
BEDOSKY: You’ll have to—my friends say I’m kind of a motormouth.
PAULEY (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.
BEDOSKY: 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.
PAULEY: She organized the first Caltech women’s group, didn’t she?
BEDOSKY: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.
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