Hillary Orbits Venus Read online

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  Copyright (C)1999 Pamela Sargent

  First published in Amazing Stories, Spring 1999

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  “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/g, 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/g 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/g 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/g, 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/g 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/g 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, meaning that the period of its rotation was 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/g'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 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 a
lso 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.”