The Mountain Cage

by Pamela Sargent

  Dan tried to recall if there was something in the law the Democrats could use to pull a stunt like this. He couldn’t think of anything, but then he hadn’t been exactly the biggest brain in law school. Maybe the Democrats would drag out John Glenn, however old he was, to run this time. They’d probably use Ashana’s family in the campaign, too; they had plenty of reason to be pissed off at the Administration.

  “You said I could get back by the convention,” Dan murmured. “I mean, aren’t the delegates free to switch their votes if they want?”

  The minutes passed. “Well, you’re right on the money there, and no question they’d turn to you, but—see, NASA’s got sort of a little problem with the new ship. Nothing for you to worry about, just some bitty technical thing they can definitely iron out, but they’re certain they can have you back here next fall.”

  Dan was beginning to see more problems. The Democrats might use his predicament against the Republicans. They would say he wouldn’t be stranded there if the Administration had thought more about real science and space exploration and less about politics and publicity stunts, if they hadn’t been rushing to put him on another planet. He wouldn’t be on the campaign trail to inspire people and to invoke the names of his comrades; he would be only a distant voice and grainy image from Mars. The whole business might turn into as big a bummer as the end of the Gulf War.

  “What are we going to do?” Dan asked.

  When the President replied, he said, “Well, there’s a lotta sentiment here to make Marilyn our candidate.”

  That figured. The idea was so perfect that Dan was surprised he hadn’t thought of it himself. The Democrats would look mean-spirited slinging mud at a hero’s wife, one waiting and praying for her husband to return safely.

  “All I can say,” Dan said quietly, “is that she has my full support.”

  Dan finished loading the rover, climbed in and drove slowly toward the scattered Tootsie Rolls of his base. He had not had to talk to Marilyn very long to convince her to run; in fact, he had expected her to object a lot more to the idea. She would make a pretty good president, though—maybe a better one than he would have been.

  He had packed up the personal items of his comrades—Ashana’s Nikes, Ahmed’s Koran, Kiichi’s bat, and Sergei’s dolls—feeling that he wanted his dead friends’ things with him. He had also brought his golf balls and his favorite wood. The club, which had a persimmon head, had cost him a pretty penny, but he liked a driver with a solid hardwood head.

  An inspiration came to him. He stopped the rover, climbed down, then took out one of his balls and the wood. Stepping over a small crater, he set down the ball, then gripped his club. Getting in a smooth swing was going to be rough with his spacesuit on, but he thought he could manage it. Alan Shepard might be the first guy to tee off on the Moon, but Dan would be the first to do so on another planet.

  He swung his club and knew the head’s sweet spot had met the ball. The small white orb arched above the orange cratered landscape and soared toward the distant pink sky.

  Afterword to “Danny Goes to Mars”:

  In the spring of 2000, PBS televised a history of the U.S. Presidential debates. Among those interviewed was former Vice-President Dan Quayle, who to my surprise came across as dignified, mature, and articulate. By then, I was already wondering if I might have done Mr. Quayle an injustice in “Danny Goes to Mars.” It is of course easier to think kindly of those who would rule us when they are safely (or at least temporarily) out of power, but the touches of gray in Quayle’s hair and the lines aging had brought to his face made him look almost distinguished, in contrast to his earlier more callow appearance. Whatever his mental lacks, one could see him at least struggling to think things through and come to some understanding, in contrast to the incurious tabula rasa currently occupying the White House. Compared to George W Bush, a man whom events have now placed on the steepest of learning curves, Dan Quayle counts as an intellectual.

  In the spring of 1995, I was invited to give a reading of “Danny Goes to Mars” at a poetry slam in a local bar. While performing, I quickly became aware that some of my punch lines weren’t going over that well, that some of the references puzzled the audience; it’s possible that at least a few of them had only a vague idea of who Dan Quayle was. Alternate history stories, and especially satirical ones set in the present or near past featuring current figures, are probably destined to accumulate annotations in any future published editions, to remind those who once knew of what they have forgotten, and to fill in everyone else—the vast majority, probably—on details they were never aware of in the first place.

  For the benefit of those who lack my own obsessive and often nitpicky interest in American political minutiae, I offer the following annotations to this story:

  John Sununu, chief of staff for President George H. W Bush, was notable for his abrasive personality, and widely criticized for using government limousines and military aircraft to run personal errands, lapses that led to his resignation. He was a former Governor of New Hampshire and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  Marilyn Tucker Quayle, whose parents were both physicians, came from a family even more fervently right-wing than her husband’s. The Quayles met in law school at Indiana University, and Marilyn practiced law during the early years of their marriage. They are the parents of three children: Corinne, Tucker, and Ben.

  Tom Evans and Paula Parkinson were principal players in a political scandal that might have nipped Dan Quayle’s political career in the bud. Just after his election to the Senate (he had been in the House of Representatives before that), Quayle, against his wife’s advice, went off to Florida with Congressman Tom Evans and a few other Congressional buddies for what was reputed to be a weekend of golf. Paula Parkinson, an attractive blond lobbyist, turned up at the Palm Beach cottage the men had rented and remained there for the duration. When the story of this sojourn broke in 1981, it turned out that Tom Evans had been sleeping with Ms. Parkinson. He apologized for his conduct publicly, but his political career was destroyed, along with that of Tom Railsback, another Congressman at the cottage that weekend who had reputedly dallied with Paula Parkinson. Dan Quayle, however, escaped serious damage, basically by playing dumb and letting the storm blow over. Marilyn Quayle stoutly defended her husband, saying, “Anyone who knows Dan Quayle knows that he would rather play golf than have sex any day.” Paula Parkinson later made use of her babe qualities by posing nude for Playboy Magazine.

  The “Deke house at DePauw” is the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity house at DePauw University, where Dan Quayle went to college, and this fraternity had the reputation of being something of an animal house. Dan Quayle’s grandfather, father, mother, and uncle had all attended DePauw, a university that, even during the 1960s, was almost untouched by the anti-Vietnam War movement and the radical politics of other universities. In later years, when then-Congressman Dan Quayle was invited to speak at a DePauw commencement, the faculty revolted when asked to approve granting him an honorary doctorate, on the grounds that Quayle was a total mediocrity. The degree was given to him anyway, presumably because there would have been no commencement speaker otherwise.

  “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” a 1986 movie (directed by John Hughes and starring Matthew Broderick) about a smartass high school student who has truancy down to a science, was cited by Quayle as a favorite film; something in this story of a creatively subversive kid clearly spoke to him. Another movie that made a powerful impression on Quayle, who saw it while he was in law school, was “The Candidate” (1972), in which Robert Redford plays an up-and-coming politician running for the Senate. Gradually this idealistic character, with the help of his advisors, realizes that nothing he says or believes matters, that the skillful use of television and visual symbols is what will elect him. He wins the election, but at the cost of giving up nearly all of his principles. What did the young Quayle learn from this motion picture? According to a law school classmate who
saw “The Candidate” with him, Quayle was mightily impressed by the technical expertise of the political packagers and advisors depicted in the somewhat satirical movie, and spent hours analyzing their techniques.

  Marilyn and Dan Quayle now live in Arizona, where she practices law and he practices his golf.

  HILLARY ORBITS VENUS

  “In 1963 … fifteen-year-old Hillary [Rodham] wrote to NASA, asking what subjects to study to prepare for becoming an astronaut. NASA wrote back that no females need apply.”

  —Shana Alexander, “The Difficulties of Being Hillary,”

  Playboy, January 1994

  As the ship’s engines reached peak acceleration and settled into a steady background drone, mission specialist Hillary Rodham sat back in her chair and thought about how her life might have been different. It was a common human tendency, she thought, to reflect on one’s life aboard trains, planes, buses, and even during an interplanetary voyage aboard the Sacajawea, now bound for Venus.

  The turning point for her, Hillary supposed, had been the letter she had received from a minor NASA functionary during her sophomore year at Maine East High School. She had written to ask how a hopeful high school student should go about preparing to become an astronaut. The response to her earnest inquiry had fired her imagination and given her a mission—to travel into space, to set foot on the Moon, maybe even explore Mars. The technology that had built the Sacajawea and the fission-to-fusion engine that powered her, one of the more recent of the technological breakthroughs that had come along in such rapid succession after the first Moon landing, had finally put those early ambitions within her reach.

  For now, she could take great pride in being among the first crew of astronauts to travel to Venus. They would not, of course, actually land on that hellish planet with its atmosphere of carbon dioxide and a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead. She and the other three members of the crew would have to settle for orbiting the veiled planet, doing radar mapping of the surface, and sending down two probes. The probes and detailed radar maps would contribute to their knowledge of Earth’s sister planet, but the primary purpose of the mission was to test the Sacajawea on an interplanetary voyage.

  If not for L. Bruce Thomerson, an assistant to a deputy director of public relations for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Hillary might not have been aboard this spacecraft. Another career might have claimed her—medicine, perhaps, or even law. Or, despite the urgings of a mother who had always encouraged her daughter not to limit her ambitions, she might have settled for the more conventional life of a suburban housewife in a place much like Park Ridge, Illinois, the Chicago suburb where she and her brothers had grown up.

  But L. Bruce Thomerson—seized either by sympathy for her dream or perhaps merely tired of having to discourage yet another idealistic young girl—had deflected her from such possibilities with his typed postscript to the form letter that had told her NASA was not interested in any female astronauts. “No females need apply to the astronaut training program now,” Thomerson had added to the letter, “but that could change in years to come, and there are some signs within the Agency that it may. My advice is to work hard at your high school math and science courses and prepare yourself for college work in those subjects. Keep yourself physically fit. Consider graduate school or a career in one of the military services. Make yourself a credit to your family and community, and you might become just the kind of young woman NASA would proudly accept as one of our astronauts someday.”

  There had been detours along the road that had taken her to Houston and the Johnson Space Center and to Cape Canaveral, but Hillary had kept her goal in sight, determined to be among the corps of men and women who would reach for the stars. Her marriage had been one such detour—or so it had seemed for a while. She had promised herself never to completely surrender her own name and identity, to lose her life to her husband’s career, yet she had come perilously close to doing that.

  There had been all the usual justifications. Marriage, after all, meant compromising, even when it often seemed that it was the woman who had to make most of the compromises. Nurturing her husband, advancing his interests, and encouraging him in his work were worth a few sacrifices. Even at the worst times, she had always, partly for their daughter’s sake, rejected the option of divorce. And the most important reason for staying with him, for sometimes looking the other way even when his lapses had hurt her—she loved him. Throughout all the arguments, the demands of his work and hers, the flings with other women that he had not entirely given up even after they were married, she had continued to love him. She had stuck it out, stayed the course, and again Hillary was grateful that she had, even though it had meant postponing her own dream for a while. The time had come when he had needed her, badly.

  Now, aboard the Sacajawea, she wondered if, despite her own accomplishments, her husband’s reflected glory might have tipped the scales of NASA in her favor. Hillary thought of the last press conference she and her crewmates had endured before the flight; at least a third of the questions directed to her had been about her husband. Even knowing that her qualifications were the equal of any astronaut’s, and superior to many, she still feared that she might always remain in his shadow.

  Foolish, she thought, to think that way. She had never been one for self-pity, even during the worst times. She would certainly not indulge in self-doubt while on the most important journey of her life.

  That the Sacajawea was going to Venus, rather than to Mars, was the reason all four of the astronauts aboard her were women. The exigencies of politics and public relations had given Hillary and her crewmates this mission, since it had seemed appropriate that the first human beings to travel to Venus—to orbit Venus, at any rate—be female. They would not be the first crew to test the fission-fusion pulse engine that powered the Sacajawea; an earlier version of this ship, the Selene, had gone to the Moon and back in two days almost a year ago, in 1997. But NASA’s first all-female space crew had guaranteed even more media coverage of this mission than of the pulse engine’s first test.

  “Peak acceleration achieved,” Lieutenant Colonel Evelyn Holder, pilot, Air Force Academy alumna, and commander of this mission, murmured at Hillary’s left. Evelyn ran a hand through her short brown hair and leaned back in her chair. “This baby’s going to pretty much run herself from now on.”

  “Never thought I’d see the day,” Judith Resnik said from behind Evelyn, “when we could get to Venus in less than three weeks.” Judy, an electrical engineer by training, was a slender woman near Hillary’s age with a cloud of thick dark hair.

  “Never thought I’d see the day,” Victoria Cho muttered, “when I’d be on Oprah and get a photo shoot in Vanity Fair.” Victoria was a geologist—or maybe “aphroditologist” was the more appropriate term for her profession during the course of this mission.

  “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 lov
e 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 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.