The Mountain Cage

by Pamela Sargent

  Hillary paused, afraid for a moment that she might cry again. “That was how he lived his life, and that’s what he believed right up to the end.” The certainties of her Methodist youth were of little use now; Dick would have been furious at her and disappointed in her if she had invoked them. Over the years, some of his doubt and uncertainty had crept into her view of the universe. Her occasional prayers and Scriptural readings were more a nostalgic reminder of a comfort her spiritual beliefs had once provided than an affirmation of faith. She wondered if she ever would have come to that kind of agnosticism without her husband’s influence. Against everything she had been taught in childhood, she could even believe that her doubts might have made her a better person. There had always existed in her a tendency to self-righteousness; doubt made her more conscious of her failings.

  Hillary bowed her head. She would honor her husband’s memory by not praying for him.

  Hillary strapped herself into her seat. “I don’t know about you,” Evelyn said from her pilot’s seat, “but I’m a little scared.” It was an admission none of them would have made had any male astronauts been present. The ship’s drive might fail, stranding them in orbit around Venus. The Sacajawea might accelerate until the midpoint of their return journey and never decelerate. If the mission failed, it would almost make certain that they would all have Venusian geological features named after themselves, which wasn’t exactly consoling.

  “Maybe someday, people will settle Venus,” Chelsea had told Hillary in a phone call from MIT a couple of months ago.

  “No way,” Hillary had said. “You’d need a completely different planet.”

  “That’s what I meant, Mom.” Chelsea had gone on to speak of terraforming—engineering algae to seed the sulfuric clouds, finding a way to shield Venus from the sun so that it could cool, maybe even using the nanotechnology Richard Feynman had envisioned, twenty years before there was even a name for that field, to build microscopic machines capable of altering the planetary environment on a molecular level. Hillary had suddenly wished that Chelsea’s father could have seen what his daughter had become, how much of him there still was in her.

  She was suddenly overwhelmed by a vision of Venus as a future home for humankind. A terraformed Venus would not isolate colonists and their descendants from Earth, as a colonized Mars would through the necessary adaptation to a much lower gravity. People would come and go freely. She remembered all the stories of Venus she had read as a girl, from the swampy planet of the earliest tales to the vision of hell transformed into a new garden.

  “All systems go,” Evelyn murmured. “Girls, we’re ready to roll.” For a moment, Hillary had the sensation of being outside herself, as though everything around her were no more than a dimly imagined possibility that had never come to pass, and then the thrust of the Sacajawea’s engines pressed her against her seat.

  They were on their way home—but with the success of this mission, Hillary was sure that Earth would not remain humankind’s only home for long. The Moon’s research outposts would soon welcome settlers, and there would be Mars to explore. As Venus shrank on the rear view-screen, Hillary recalled the fifteen-year-old girl in Park Ridge who had dreamed of becoming an astronaut, and knew that in spite of the setbacks and delays, the years of postponing her dream and finally winning a place as an astronaut and then of waiting for a chance at a mission, that all of the hard work and the sacrifices and the disappointments had been worth it.

  She had kept faith with her younger self.

  Evelyn Holder had brought her husband to the White House reception and dinner in honor of the four astronauts. Judith Resnik was accompanied by Senator Bob Kerrey, who was rumored to be getting more serious about her; if he did decide to run for President, having an astronaut as a wife could only help. Victoria Cho had her good friend Ellison Onizuka, fellow astronaut and space station veteran, in tow.

  Hillary stood with her daughter, smiling and nodding as she shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with the other guests. Chelsea Feynman, who had given up her usual uniform of jeans and sweatshirts for a long blue silk dress, was holding the medal that the President had presented to Hillary. She proudly opened the small box to show the medal to the Vice-President, as she had earlier when former President Glenn had asked to see it.

  “You know,” the Vice-President was saying, “I truly envy your mother. I would have loved to have been an astronaut myself. You should be very proud of your mother.”

  “I am,” Chelsea said.

  Hillary smiled as the Vice-President turned over her medal to read the inscription on the back; he was both a space policy wonk and a big supporter of NASA, so she had resolved to be as pleasant to him as possible, despite his reputation as something of an opportunist and a hatchet man for the President. At any rate, Vice-President Newt Gingrich seemed on his best behavior tonight.

  “To Hillary Rodham Feynman,” Vice-President Gingrich read from the medal, “for the courage she has shown in the exploration of space.” He beamed at her and her daughter. Hillary remembered how, a year after Dick’s death, she had impulsively added his last name to her own on her application to NASA. In public, she was still known by her own name, the name she had kept throughout her marriage, but in NASA’s records and any awards she received for her service as an astronaut, she would always be listed as Hillary Rodham Feynman. Her feminist soul was at peace with that; her husband, perhaps in more ways than even she realized, had helped to make a better space program possible. His consultations with the NASA scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she was sure, had saved the space agency many mistakes, perhaps even disasters.

  The First Lady, taller in person than she seemed on TV and with a mass of attractive curly brown hair, bore down on them, apparently about to rescue Hillary and Chelsea from the Vice-President. Mary Steenburgen Clinton might give the appearance of a soft-spoken Southern lady, but it was widely believed that her husband might never have risen to become president without her. Not long after marrying the up-and-coming young Arkansan politician William Jefferson Clinton in the early Eighties, Mary Clinton had given up a promising career as an actress to become her husband’s closest advisor and unofficial campaign manager. A charming but disorganized, undisciplined, skirt-chasing, and only intermittently successful politician had gone on to win election as his state’s governor, as a senator, and finally as president in 1992. Mary Clinton’s gentle demeanor, it was said, was only part of a public performance that concealed a sharp political intelligence and the well-honed instincts of a female Machiavelli.

  “That Bill Clinton was always a right smart young feller,” one of the President’s old mentors from Arkansas had said in a television interview, after President Clinton had won a second term by a landslide, “but it was Mary who done whipped him into shape.” Hillary could well believe that. President Bill Clinton, despite his many accomplishments in office, struck her—in his public persona, anyway—as the kind of charming rogue, weak at the center, who might never have won over the American public had he not been preceded in his office by the upright John Glenn and the dour Bob Dole. He could be grateful that people had grown tired of such rectitude and now wanted to enjoy the fruits of prosperity with a more congenial and lax chief executive.

  “Ms. Rodham,” Mary Steenburgen Clinton murmured as she shook Hillary’s hand, “I am so glad you and your daughter could both be with us. I must tell you that of all the dinners we’ve had in the White House so far, I have looked forward to this one the most.”

  Hillary very much doubted that, but the sincerity and warmth in the First Lady’s voice was enough to win her over. “You gave a wonderful performance in Time After Time,” she responded. “It’s one of my favorite films.”

  “That British dude who played H.G. Wells in it wasn’t bad, either,” Chelsea added.

  Hillary glanced at her daughter, who probably didn’t know that it was widely rumored that Mary Steenburgen Clinton had been romantically involved with
her leading man in that movie, which had been made before her marriage to Bill Clinton, but the First Lady was still smiling.

  “Malcolm McDowell, you mean,” Mary Clinton said. “No, he wasn’t bad at all.”

  This President and his wife had a reputation for informality, and people were already moving toward the entrance to the dining room in no discernible order. Hillary lingered near her daughter, who was answering Ms. Clinton’s queries about her postgraduate work and her life in Boston, uncertain of what to do now, when she felt a hand gently touch her elbow.

  “Ms. Rodham?”

  Hillary turned and found herself looking up into the eyes of the President of the United States. He had shaken her hand impersonally at the earlier ceremony, when the members of the Venus mission had been presented with their medals, but now his gaze was definitely focused on her. With that broad grin and that twinkle in his eye, she could almost believe that he was flirting with her, unlikely as that was with his wife standing nearby.

  “Mr. President,” Hillary said.

  Bill Clinton took her right hand and pressed it between both of his. “You and your sister astronauts have accomplished a wonderful thing,” he said, “traveling to Venus and back. I’ve always had great admiration for brave and brilliant women, and it’s a privilege to have you all as our guests.”

  He was a charmer, all right.

  Their eyes locked … and then the moment passed.

  The President moved away and gracefully took the First Lady’s arm.

  Chelsea glanced at Hillary and smiled.

  Hillary followed her daughter toward the White House dining room, where the tables waited beneath the glittering chandeliers.

  Afterword to “Hillary Orbits Venus”:

  This story seemed a natural after writing “Danny Goes to Mars,” and in fact I had the idea for a Hillary story not long after “Danny” was published, yet this story balked at being written and didn’t reach fruition for some years. I just couldn’t get a handle on Hillary as a character, a difficulty I seem to have shared with a great many Americans. Are we talking about Lady Macbeth here, a grasping materialist, a sincere do-gooder, or simply a woman greedy for power? Maybe we’re simply talking about a politician, a species of being whose primary modus operandi is not to give away the game one is playing and one’s deep longing for that game’s ultimate overriding goal, namely power, to the citizenry at large. When these masters of game-playing, deception, sincere-sounding insincerity, and hypocrisy are complex enough in their personalities, depicting them convincingly, rather than only caricaturing them, poses a formidable task.

  Hillary Clinton is, to her credit, endlessly interesting. In the age of reality TV and a public appetite for gossip that seems to increase by the day, the least we can expect of our rulers is that they provide us with plenty of entertainment.

  A number of characters in “Hillary Orbits Venus” are obviously based on real people. Here is what happened in our world, prejudicially known as “the real world,” to some of them:

  Judith Resnik and Ellison Onizuka were mission specialists who died aboard the space shuttle Challenger when it exploded seventy-three seconds after takeoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida on January 28, 1986.

  Jerrie Cobb was one of thirteen women pilots who passed all of NASA’s rigorous tests for astronauts in 1960, before NASA made the decision to accept only men with experience as military test pilots into the astronaut corps. Cobb testified at Congressional hearings in 1962 in favor of accepting women into the astronaut program, but sixteen years passed before women became astronauts in the U.S.; in 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. Jerrie Cobb has spent nearly four decades as a pilot flying seeds and medical supplies to people living in remote areas of the Amazon rain forest, and has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

  Senator Edward M. Kennedy was not in Florida during the flight of Apollo 11, but in Massachusetts, where he was involved in a car accident near Chappaquiddick that resulted in the death of a former Kennedy campaign worker, Mary Jo Kopechne.

  Richard Feynman’s last public service was as a member of the presidential commission appointed to investigate the causes of the Challenger disaster. His testimony at a hearing on February 10, 1986, in which he demonstrated the lack of resiliency in the Challenger’s O-rings at low temperatures by dropping a piece of the material used to manufacture them into ice water, dominated that day’s news reports of the commission’s findings. He died on February 15, 1988, with his wife, Gweneth Howarth Feynman, at his side; they were the parents of two children, Carl and Michelle. “Infinity” (1996), a motion picture about Feynman’s early years and his marriage to his first wife, Arline Greenbaum, featured Matthew Broderick in the role of the young Richard Feynman.

  Mary Steenburgen was born and grew up in Arkansas. In 1980, she won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress in “Melvin and Howard” and married Malcolm McDowell, her costar in “Time After Time;” they were divorced ten years later. Active in politics, she campaigned for Bill Clinton in 1992. She married actor Ted Danson in the late 1990s; President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton were guests at the Steenburgen-Danson wedding.

  In 2000, Hillary Rodham Clinton won election to the United States Senate from New York State.

  FEARS

  I was on my way back to Sam’s when a couple of boys tried to run me off the road, banging my fender a little before they sped on, looking for another target. My throat tightened and my chest heaved as I wiped my face with a handkerchief. The boys had clearly stripped their car to the minimum, ditching all their safety equipment, knowing that the highway patrol was unlikely to stop them; the police had other things to worry about.

  The car’s harness held me; its dashboard lights flickered. As I waited for it to steer me back onto the road, the engine hummed, choked, and died. I switched over to manual; the engine was silent.

  I felt numb. I had prepared myself for my rare journeys into the world outside my refuge, working to perfect my disguise. My angular, coarse-featured face stared back at me from the mirror overhead as I wondered if I could still pass. I had cut my hair recently, my chest was still as flat as a boy’s, and the slightly padded shoulders of my suit imparted a bit of extra bulk. I had always been taken for a man before, but I had never done more than visit a few out-of-the-way, dimly lighted stores where the proprietors looked closely only at cards or cash.

  I couldn’t wait there risking a meeting with the highway patrol. The police might look a bit too carefully at my papers and administer a body search on general principles. Stray women had been picked up before, and the rewards for such a discovery were great; I imagined uniformed men groping at my groin, and shuddered. My disguise would get a real test. I took a deep breath, released the harness, then got out of the car.

  The garage was half a mile away. I made it there without enduring more than a few honks from passing cars.

  The mechanic listened to my husky voice as I described my problem, glanced at my card, took my keys, then left in his tow truck, accompanied by a younger mechanic. I sat in his office, out of sight of the other men, trying not to let my fear push me into panic. The car might have to remain here for some time; I would have to find a place to stay. The mechanic might even offer me a lift home, and I didn’t want to risk that. Sam might be a bit too talkative in the man’s presence; the mechanic might wonder about someone who lived in such an inaccessible spot. My hands were shaking; I thrust them into my pockets.

  I started when the mechanic returned to his office, then smiled nervously as he assured me that the car would be ready in a few hours; a component had failed, he had another like it in the shop, no problem. He named a price that seemed excessive; I was about to object, worried that argument might only provoke him, then worried still more that I would look odd if I didn’t dicker with him. I settled for frowning as he slipped my card into his terminal, then handed it back to me.

  “No sense hanging around here.” He waved one beef
y hand at the door. “You can pick up a shuttle to town out there, comes by every fifteen minutes or so.”

  I thanked him and went outside, trying to decide what to do. I had been successful so far; the other mechanics didn’t even look at me as I walked toward the road. An entrance to the town’s underground garage was just across the highway; a small, glassy building with a sign saying “Marcello’s” stood next to the entrance. I knew what service Marcello sold; I had driven by the place before. I would be safer with one of his employees, and less conspicuous if I kept moving; curiosity overcame my fear for a moment. I had made my decision.

  I walked into Marcello’s. One man was at a desk; three big men sat on a sofa near one of the windows, staring at the small holo screen in front of them. I went to the desk and said, “I want to hire a bodyguard.”

  The man behind the desk looked up; his mustache twitched. “An escort. You want an escort.”

  “Call it whatever you like.”

  “For how long?”

  “About three or four hours.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Just a walk through town, maybe a stop for a drink. I haven’t been to town for a while, thought I might need some company.”

  His brown eyes narrowed. I had said too much; I didn’t have to explain myself to him. “Card.”

  I got out my card. He slipped it into his outlet and peered at the screen while I tried to keep from fidgeting, expecting the machine to spit out the card even after all this time. He returned the card. “You’ll get your receipt when you come back.” He waved a hand at the men on the sofa. “I got three available. Take your pick.”