Hillary Orbits Venus Read online

  “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/g'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 of 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/g'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/g'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/g 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/g,” 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.

  PAULEY: So it was rough for you.

  BEDOSKY: Imagine the Pope and the Catholic Church having to deal with the first women in the College of Cardinals. We were intruding on the all-male priesthood of science. We didn't belong there, the way some saw it, or else we were freaks. It'
s a lot different at Caltech now, but with us, about the best you could hope for was to be treated as a kind of honorary man.

  PAULEY: Did Hillary Rodham, coming into that extremely male environment from a women's college, ever get discouraged?

  BEDOSKY: If she did, she never let on. Hillary was about the most together person I'd ever met, even back then. She was kind of driven, if you want to know the truth, and she knew exactly what she wanted to do. She was going to get her doctorate in biochemistry, and then she was going to teach and do medical research on calcium deficiencies and bone loss and osteoporosis, because she guessed that would give her a better shot at being an astronaut someday. And she was right, given the physiological problems the early astronauts developed on Skylab One, before the Doughnut—excuse me, Skylab-Mir Two—was built. And even with a revolving space station... (pause)

  PAULEY: She told you back then that she wanted to be an astronaut?

  BEDOSKY: Yeah. It was something she basically kept to herself, but I could tell she really meant it. She'd drive up to JPL—the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena—every time she had a free moment, to see what the latest unmanned probes were sending back. Sometimes she was with her husband, when he was doing some consulting there, but other times she went by herself. Met some important people there, too—like I said, she was always more political than the rest of us.

  PAULEY: You were with Hillary when she met her husband, weren't you?

  BEDOSKY: Oh, yeah. That was in the spring of 1970. Hillary and I were sitting in the Greasy—in the cafeteria, having some coffee. He was sitting at a table near us with some other students, talking and occasionally beating out a rhythm on the tabletop with his hands—he played the bongo drums, you know—and he kept staring at Hillary. This wasn't the first time, either. About a week before, in the library, he was staring at her, too. I remember wondering why, because Hillary wasn't really his type—he was more into California blondes, your basic babe type. Hillary had started lightening her hair some, but about all she ever wore were sweatshirts and jeans or loose dresses with Peter Pan collars, and she was still wearing thick Coke-bottle glasses, but obviously he must have noticed something that interested him. So he's staring at her, and she's staring right back.

  PAULEY: And then what happened?

  BEDOSKY: Hillary said, “I'm going to go over and speak to him,” and before I could say anything, she got up and walked over and said to him, “Look, if you're going to keep staring at me and I'm going to keep staring back, I think we should at least know each other. I'm Hillary Rodham.” And then she put out her hand.

  PAULEY: Her daughter told me that her father used to tell that story to their friends.

  BEDOSKY: I think that's what got to him, that Hillary had that much chutzpah and just came right up and introduced herself. So he said, “Well, I'm Dick Feynman.” But of course she already knew that.

  * * * *

  “That's Chelsea with her aunt Joan, Dick's sister,” Hillary said to Judy Resnik as the other woman sat down on Hillary's bunk. “And this photo was taken during her freshman year at M.I.T.” Chelsea Michelle Feynman strongly resembled her father, with the same lean body, unruly hair, and slightly goofy smile. There was so little of Hillary in her daughter that it was almost as though she had been no more than a receptacle and incubator for her husband's seed, as medieval physicians had believed women were.

  “And she's going into physics,” Judy said, “just like her father and her aunt Joan. It must run in the family.”

  “Dick was a great father,” Hillary said. “He liked being a father so much that he wanted another child right away. We kept trying, and we were thinking of adopting when—” She paused. Even after all the years that had passed, she found it painful to remember that time. “He'd be so proud of Chelsea now,” she finished. Her daughter, she knew, had saved her marriage.

  * * * *

  Unedited portion of interview with Daria Derrick by Deborah Norville for “Inside Edition,” to be aired February 12, 1998.

  DARIA DERRICK: It was after Hillary moved into Dick's house. Supposedly she was still sharing an apartment with her friend Rita, but that was just for cover—everybody knew she was living with Richard Feynman.

  DEBORAH NORVILLE: He'd broken up with you by then?

  DERRICK: Oh, yeah. Not that we were ever really going together. Dick was a real Lothario. I always knew he wasn't serious about me, but... (pauses).

  NORVILLE: Yes?

  DERRICK: When I was with him, when he was focusing all his attention—all that high-powered genius—on me, it was like I was the only woman in the world. He might have been this Nobel Prize-winning physicist, but he was also a very sexy guy.

  NORVILLE: So you went over to his house to get something you'd left there.

  DERRICK: Yeah, and Hillary answered the door. She'd only been living with him for a couple of months, but she already looked different—her hair was a lot blonder, for one thing, and she was wearing contact lenses. She was definitely looking more like a California girl—probably thought that was the way to keep him interested.

  NORVILLE: Richard Feynman had a lot of unhappiness in his personal life, didn't he?

  DERRICK: You can say that again. I still remember the night he pulled out this old battered suitcase with all these old letters and photographs from his first wife—Arline, the one who died in the Forties from tuberculosis. I realized then that I could never be what she was to him, or what his third wife had been to him, either. He never talked much about his second wife.

  NORVILLE: The one who divorced him during the Fifties on the grounds of mental cruelty?

  DERRICK: The one who claimed he drove her crazy with his bongo drums and with doing calculus problems in bed. I think he knew that marriage was a mistake, but Arline—Arline was always going to be perfect in his mind, because she passed away so young. And Gweneth, his third wife—if she hadn't died in that car accident, I think he would have stayed happily married to her—she was really good for him. That's what one of his old friends told me, anyway—she loved him, but she was sort of independent-minded, too. Maybe that's what attracted him to Hillary. I think maybe he married her to keep her from moving out. She wanted a serious relationship, and I guess he was ready for marriage again by then.

  NORVILLE: Did Hillary tell you that herself?

  DERRICK: Oh, no. She didn't talk about personal stuff with anybody, and I wasn't exactly her bosom buddy. I mean, she had to have known Dick had a roving eye, but she must have forgiven him for it. After all, she was married to one of the most brilliant men in the world, and that's worth more than monogamy, isn't it?

  * * * *

  “I'm getting married,” Hillary said to her parents over the phone.

  “Who's the lucky young man?” her mother asked.

  Barely pausing for breath between sentences, Hillary explained that she was going to marry a man who was almost thirty years older than she was and that this would be his fourth marriage, quickly adding that he was the world-renowned physicist Richard Feynman, that he had worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb during World War II, and that he had won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work in quantum electrodynamics in 1965.

  A long silence ensued. “He's a Jew, isn't he,” her father said at last.

  “Well, yes. He's from a Jewish family. Dick's not very religious, though. If you must know, he's basically an atheist.” Hillary heard her mother sigh. “We want to get married before the fall semester starts, and I hope you'll both come out here for the wedding. Dick's mother and sister will be there, too, but we're not making a big fuss.”

  “A physicist,” her father said, still sounding too bewildered to get really angry. “Probably an absent-minded professor.”

  “He won the Nobel Prize, Dad.”

  “There's money in that, isn't there? Did he put it into some good investments?”

  “He used some of it to buy a beach house in Mexico.”

  “Well
, Hillary, if you'd told me you were marrying some hillbilly from the Ozarks, I couldn't be more surprised.” Hugh Rodham heaved a sigh. “You're of age. I can't stop you. I just hope you know what you're doing.”

  “You will finish your doctorate, won't you?” her mother asked. “You won't drop out.”

  “Of course I'll finish it,” Hillary replied. Her marriage, unlike that of her parents, would be a true partnership, a relationship of equals, a meeting of minds. It occurred to her only later that being the wife of Richard Feynman would automatically give her a status it might otherwise have taken her years to attain.

  * * * *

  “Shit,” Victoria Cho said, not for the first time.

  Hillary floated up from her chair as the Sacajawea/g fell around Venus. They had been in free fall for almost thirty-six hours now, and had launched the two probes, one toward the area of Maxwell Montes, the other toward an unusual volcano near Artemis Chasma. Both probes had failed less than an hour after entering the atmosphere.

  Over by the viewscreen above the pilot's station, Evelyn Holder was listening to Sally Ride, the capcom for this mission. “The imaging team isn't happy about the probes, either,” Sally was saying, “but we'll still have the radar mapping, and the most important thing is...everything else is nominal, everything else is a-okay.”

  The Sacajawea/g had begun to decelerate on schedule, gradually slowing during the second leg of their journey to Venus. They had been orbiting Venus for less than an hour before congratulatory messages were coming in from the president and the two surviving former presidents, John Glenn and Robert Dole.

  “Everything's a-okay,” Victoria muttered, “except for the fucking probes. I was really looking forward to what those babies might tell us.”

  Hillary drifted over to the disappointed geologist. “Look at it this way,” she said. “At least you weren't the poor bastard who had to go to the Kremlin and give Commander Lebed the bad news.” The Russians had designed and built the two probes. “And there's bound to be another Venus mission before too long, with everything going this well.”