Hillary Orbits Venus

by Pamela Sargent

  Victoria smiled, then propelled herself toward the small screen showing the radar imaging of the Venusian surface. Hillary's stomach lurched, then grew calmer. Evelyn was apparently over the worst of her spacesickness. Victoria, also trained as a pilot, would not have to bring them home.

  They were all falling inside the Sacajawea/g as the ship fell around Venus. Hillary found herself thinking of how Dick had explained gravity to the five-year old Chelsea with a long stick and two lead balls dangling from a slowly twisting fiber.

  Dick had not been the kind of father that Hugh Rodham had been to her; she could not imagine her own father crawling around on the floor with her or telling her detailed stories about an imaginary world of people so small that they could live in the cracks of wooden planks. “Remember, kiddo,” Dick had said to his daughter in what Hillary always thought of as his Brooklyn cabdriver's voice, “there's always plenty of room at the bottom of things. You'd be amazed how much room there is, as long as something's tiny enough.” Hugh Rodham, with his reverence for authority, would never have told her what Dick had told Chelsea about her arithmetic. “I don't care what the teacher told you,” he had said. “There isn't just one right way to figure out the answer, there's a lot of ways. You want to solve the problem, you gotta try to do it different ways and see what works. If it isn't the teacher's way, so what?” Sometimes, after delivering yet another criticism of accepted wisdom, he would stare at Hillary, as if daring her to object.

  She knew he considered her stodgy and conservative. He could indulge his curiosity by skinny-dipping in Esalen's hot tubs, attending an est conference on quantum field theory, or floating around in a sensory deprivation tank, but somebody had to deal with practical matters. Someone had to study what investments to make, make certain Dick got paid what he deserved for his lectures, consulting jobs, and books, and placate the Caltech administrators and faculty he annoyed with his refusal to tend to the mundane and distracting business of writing grant proposals and attending faculty meetings. Someone had to take care of all that if he was to be free to ponder the nature of the universe. She had been, to use a metaphor drawn from her Methodist youth, the Martha to his Mary.

  He was a child, still free to question and wonder, a child who was a genius, who outshone even the brilliant minds of his Caltech colleagues. As she swam weightlessly toward the Sacajawea/g's starboard side, Hillary remembered how her husband had floated above the constraints that bound others. A partnership, a bond between equals—that was the kind of marriage she had sought, but it was clear from the start that Richard Feynman had few mental equals.

  It was a privilege, an honor, to be married to such a genius. Sometimes she had believed that. At other times, she had seen it as the kind of rationalization women had always grasped at for consolation.

  After acquiring her Ph.D., Hillary had accepted a position in the biology department of U.C.L.A., content to be removed from the more competitive, high-powered, and intellectually demanding atmosphere of Caltech. It was easier to use her political skills to manage the practical side of Dick's career while being on the faculty of another university, if only to avoid conflict of interest. She was free to teach her classes and do her research without having to feel that those she worked with might be comparing her more conventional mind with the brilliance of her husband's.

  * * * *

  “It's still experimental eye surgery,” Hillary had told Dick one summer evening in 1977, as they sat on a Mexican beach with Chelsea, “but I've read all the medical studies. With photorefractive keratectomy, there is a risk—I could end up with even worse vision—but there's about a two-thirds chance of ending up with twenty-twenty vision, and even twenty-forty would be good enough.”

  He was listening to her with his characteristic mixed expression of curiosity and amusement. “Is it worth it?” he asked.

  “Well, it isn't cheap.”

  “I wasn't asking about the cost, I was asking about the risk. Is it worth taking the chance and spending all that dough just so you won't have to wear contacts?”

  Hillary watched as their three-year-old daughter patted down another section of a sand structure that was beginning to look like a cyclotron. “That isn't why I want the surgery,” she murmured. “NASA wouldn't accept anybody as nearsighted as I am for astronaut training. If the operations are successful, I'll have a chance.”

  That was the first time she had confessed her long-held ambition to him. President John Glenn's recent speech, in which he had recanted the testimony he had given before a Congressional committee in 1962, had made her old dream flower inside her once more. “I argued back then,” the president had said, “that women shouldn't go into space, that it was the job of men to take risks exploring the unknown. As my wife and daughter recently reminded me, I can be mighty short-sighted for a guy who used to be a pilot. It's time for women to join men in exploring the frontier of space.”

  “We'd have to move to Houston if they accepted me,” Hillary went on, “but any university in Texas would jump at the chance to have you on the faculty. They'd probably pay you a lot more than Caltech.”

  Her husband said, “Let's see how your eye surgery goes first.”

  That night, he ran for the bathroom in their beach house and vomited. That autumn, still recovering from the first operation on her left eye, she finally persuaded him to consult his doctor, who found nothing. In the spring of 1978, with 20/20 vision in her left eye and her right eye healing rapidly, Hillary finally got him to a specialist recommended by her colleagues at U.C.L.A.

  Dick had a tumor of the abdomen. The surgeon who operated on him told her it was myxoid liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer that had already destroyed his spleen and one of his kidneys. He had an 11 to 41 per cent chance of surviving five years, depending on which study she looked at. It was highly unlikely that he would live another ten years.

  Hillary forced herself to ignore two possibilities, neither of which she would ever mention to him. The first was that his work at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb might have been responsible for his disease. The second was that, had she not been so preoccupied with her eye surgery and her applications and interviews with NASA, she might have noticed the slight bulge at his waist earlier, might have pushed him into seeing the physicians and specialists soon enough for them to have saved him.

  * * * *

  Hillary had not dreamed of her husband for some time, but now, drifting between sleep and wakefulness as the Sacajawea/g orbited Venus, she found herself standing on a sunlit beach, watching him as he waded in the surf. She had dreamed of him almost every night after his death, and the dreams had convinced her that he was still alive, that the recurring tumors and the second rare type of cancer that had struck at his bone marrow and the failure of his remaining kidney had never happened, had been mistaken diagnoses, until she woke up and once again remembered.

  Everything she knew, all the research she had done, was powerless to help him. That he had lived for another ten years after his diagnosis had been beating the odds. What had kept him going was his work, his feeling that there was still so much to teach and to learn, so many more ways to find and use the language of mathematics to convey the simple and beautiful laws of physical reality.

  She had withdrawn her application to NASA, devoting herself to making his remaining time as carefree as possible. The thought that NASA might be unlikely to welcome as an astronaut a woman who would disrupt the life of a stricken man, especially a man who was one of the world's greatest physicists, crossed her mind for only a moment, and made her despise herself for thinking it.

  “You know,” he had told her a few years before his death, “I don't think we'd still be married if we didn't have Chelsea. There wouldn't have been enough to hold us together.” Cruel as the statement seemed, she knew it to be the truth. Rooted in conventionality, toiling at her own work and taking care of all the practical matters he saw as distractions, she knew that they had begun to drift apart even in the earliest days of
their marriage. Having their daughter had linked his quicksilver brilliance to her stolidity; he had loved Chelsea enough to again feel some love for Hillary. She could look at their child and see what she herself might have become growing up in a different world, a world of sun and sand and a father who could reveal the wonder and beauty of that world.

  After his death, she gave him the simple burial he had wanted, with no ritual and only herself, their daughter, and Dick's sister and one of his cousins to mourn him at the graveside. A month after that, his friends and colleagues at Caltech held a memorial gathering in his honor. Hillary found herself in a large auditorium packed with fellow physicists, graduate students, former students, engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, old girl friends, and eccentrics Dick had met on the beach or in bars and cafes while playing his bongo drums. The written eulogy she had prepared suddenly seemed inadequate; it was conventional, sentimental, stodgy—all the things her husband was not.

  She was to be the first to speak. She left her written remembrance on her chair; she would speak from her heart.

  Chelsea watched her with Dick's eyes as Hillary walked to the podium, looked into the sea of faces, and said, “Toward the end of Dick's life, my dear husband and I used to talk about—pardon the cliché—the meaning of life. I can think of nothing more appropriate now than to offer some of his own remarks on that topic.” He had expressed such sentiments often enough, and the outlook they expressed was so central to his life, that she could easily recall his words. “He would say, ‘I have approximate answers and different degrees of certainty about things, but I'm not totally sure of anything and there's a lot I don't know, such as whether it means anything at all to ask why we're here. But I can live with that, and die with it, too. I'm not scared by not knowing, by being in a universe without any purpose, and as far as I can tell, that's how it is. It doesn't frighten me. I'd rather admit I don't know than grab at some answer that might be wrong.'”

  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/g 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 M.I.T. 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/g'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 t
he 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.