Mary C Rabbitt and the Gun Out of Time

By now, my watchers, you are familiar with my philosophy, when it comes to fighting the Ice. A bold declaration of war and two stout picks, that’s what I say, have said, over and over, into the faces of a long line of USGS administrative heavyweights but mostly John Quick. I even shouted it from the public gallery, in those fateful closing hours of the final session of the 45th Congress. Alas, President Rutherford B Hayes took no notice and signed the appropriations bill anyway, and thus was the USGS established.

Oh that gallery. That sunny dome! Those so ignorant of ice! Of course the whole joint was rotten with USGS field researchers, many of them on permanent assignment to March 3, 1879, their well-worn period dungarees pressed into well-worn depressions in their assigned seats. They attended, always, the same day, again and again. Watching for deviation, see. They were there to make sure people like me didn’t cause any trouble. The USGS’s dominion over the Made Wind was considerable, but not absolute.

Eventually, as we know, my access to this area of the High Past was restricted, proscribed indeed, and my occasional visits to that heady carnival afternoon of important huffing and shuffling of papers and pouring of celebratory brandies dwindled in my own frame of reference. But I was there, once. That very first day.

If I’m honest, I’ve always known that talking to pre-IGY types was a waste of time. Or maybe not, maybe it was more like an indulgence. Guilty pleasure? Crashing soirees and lectures and basking in the meaningless celebrity of men and women for whom the USGS really was just a new agency in the Department of the Interior, concerned with nothing more than mapping mineral deposits, surveying for the railroads, and just generally sort of wafting around in a dream of scientific altruism. It was the lack of cynicism, I think, that attracted me.

That all changed after the IGY, of course. And not just because of the Dissociation.

Mary C Rabbitt, the Aunt Who Wasn’t, joined the USGS in 1949 as an example of a truly rare kind of scientist; a woman. No that’s glib, but it was a big part of why the Aunts tried to recruit her. Like me shouting from the gallery of the 45th Congress though, the Aunts’ own philosophical declaration made little impact. And how could it? Mary C Rabbitt was a geologist. A seismologist. A student of the 1904 Conservation Movement. She and her husband were members of the group that founded the GA. And by the time Katherine buttonholed her at some seismology conference in Tokyo in the mid-1980s, Mary C Rabbitt was a retired and respected historian of geology itself. You know, as a science. She’d written a book about John Wesley Powell, Director at Large. She was basically the Josephus of the USGS, the captive-rebel-turned-historian, and the REALBOW was her Masada Option. But more on that later.

Eventually Aunty Katherine and I were able to share a drink or two and laugh over the symmetry. Not laugh out loud laugh, more sort of rueful chuckle laugh, but still. There I was trying to stop the USGS by telling an ascendant United States Government that we didn’t need USGS tricks and technology to fight the Ice. And there was Katherine trying to stop, or at least ameliorate, the REALBOW by recruiting the founder of the Geophysical Abstracts Unit as some kind of double agent.

“Two years after retirement,” I reminded Katherine, in that bar, somewhere.

“There was an idea that she’d be better placed to effect cultural change.” The thick-rimmed glasses flashing in the lamplight. The long fingers curling around the stem of a wineglass.

“There was an idea?”

“Alright, it was my idea. Mary C Rabbitt as a respected, senior, female figure, bringing select individuals into her confidence, the right people, at the right time, at the right pace. All that. As opposed to the crazy wife of a glorified quartermaster saying crazy things.”

“But she said no.”

“Honestly, I don’t think she even understood what I was trying to tell her. Seismologists,” Katherine tapped at the side of her head. “Not exactly your head-in-the-clouds types. Not exactly your looking at the stars types. She would have made a damn good Aunt. Further in my defence, and against the idea of earlier recruitment?”

My Guinness was finally ready to drink but I dutifully said what anyway.

“You know her husband’s name was Jack Rabbitt? No wait it’s worse, his name was John but he went by Jack. Jack Rabbitt. Seriously what is it with these Americans? Dicky Byrd, Jack Rabbitt...”

I waited for more examples but she didn’t seem to have any. I drank the Guinness and moved on.

Katherine was right about one thing, Mary C Rabbitt did make a damn good Aunt, at least to the yak and I. De facto. She was the constant presence, the reassuring and familiar face at Geophysical Abstracts. The GA as you might have learnt it, my watchers, that unassuming set of rooms above a cavernous warehouse, from which the USGS dealt so much of its mischief.

I first met Mary C Rabbitt, in my frame of reference, one afternoon when the Yak and I were in at the GA having our goldwire rethreaded. We were slumped in a couple of what looked like dentist’s chairs, and a couple of extremely nervous-seeming techs were being all gingerly and whatnot about our collective cartilage.

“Quick’s on sabbatical,” said a voice from behind my line of sight. “Quick’s out, I’m in.”

“Say again over?” I asked, and then the tech squealed as I jerked my head trying to get a look at the voice. I caught a glimpse of a human leant against the doorjamb. It appeared to be in a dark skirt and cardigan of some kind, which was the style at the time.

Low heels clacked on linoleum and Mary C Rabbitt moved across my field of view with her arms folded. She wore draftsman-style spectacles with heavy black frames.

“Quick is out, I am in.” She took off the spectacles and leaned in to examine the tech’s work.

“Quick’s out?” I said. “Did you say sabbatical?”

“Probably a code word. Give me that!” Mary C Rabbitt snatched the needle from the cowering tech and began going about my ear with wartime efficiency. I tried not to let my eyes water. “Quick says he is on sabbatical but he could be in the field, or at one of his many supposedly secret labs, or anyplace he damn well pleases.” A determined tug. “And as long as it’s not anywhere near me or this office, that’s peach pie.”

Mary C Rabbitt’s needlework had me at something of a disadvantage.

“Mary C Rabbitt,” she announced, starting another loop. “And you are the Aspect Hunter. I can tell by the Yak.”

A flutter of lip from the other side of the room.

“There,” Mary C Rabbitt stood back and held the needle out to the tech. “That’s how you do it. Keep the loops tight, especially the triples.” The tech took the needle and wilted out of history. “I’d kill for your level of access, you can bet,” she said, I assumed to me, I assumed about the goldwire and travel on the Made Wind. She rounded on the Yak. “But doesn’t it give you headaches?”

I blinked. “Well, bureaucratic headaches.” I heard a thermostat go clunk, elsewhere in the building. “By which I mean administrative hea-“

“Yes very droll. My god what a magnificent helix,” she had one of the Yak’s ears between two fingers and was yanking it around. “Where do you have this, usually? We don’t want you looking tagged, after all.” The Yak gave a surprised-sounding whinny as the needle plunged. Apparently the question had been rhetorical, but I had to admit, I liked the consideration it showed. Not that the Yak cared how its ears looked. It wore the goldwire like it did anything else the USGS demanded: With extremely bad grace.

The second tech was already gone. I hadn’t even seen her leave.

“It’s very nice to meet you, by the way,” said Mary C Rabbitt, as she bent to her work. “We haven’t bumped into each other in the IGY yet,” she paused and looked over her shoulder. “Have we? That’s where your reputation precedes you.” A pause. I imagined a brief frown. “Or whatever the phrase is. Drat of a thing, the Made Wind.” The Yak flinched. “I’m a seismologist at heart, of course. Though I’m starting to think that really what I am is an historian.”

Yes she said an historian. I was beginning to suspect that Mary C Rabbitt and I were going to get along.

“Done,” she barked and the Yak did that whole-body shake thing it does where nobody else in the room can hear, speak, or (I’ve advised) breathe until it’s over.

“How dramatic,” said Mary C Rabbitt. “Tea and or coffee? I would so appreciate a moment or two to bend your ear.” She smiled and moved out of the room. This was very much her style, I soon came to know, to say something that you weren’t quite sure if it was a joke or not, and then move out of the room. Not walk, I mean she did walk, but there was just something about Mary C Rabbitt, she was one of those with whom you were in the presence, as they say. She moved. Katherine’s approach to her, not so deep in the future from where the Yak and I now stood, may have been cockeyed, but her instincts were spot on. Mary C Rabbitt was perfect Aunt material. With goldwire coiled tight, and by her hand (especially those triples, my watchers!), I could see how the Made Wind bent around her. Perhaps not so dramatically as it did around Katherine, or even John Quick, but it was there. So no Aunt, but still a formidable and important ally against Ice.

I looked at the Yak and did a face. It shrugged. We moved out of the room ourselves, tangling in the doorway only a little, in time enough to see half of Mary C Rabbitt transiting into the common room down the hall.

“Kettle’s over there,” said Mary C Rabbitt, emptying the last of the coffee into a chipped enamel mug. “Or you can wait for this thing to,” she waved her hand irritably at the percolator, with the familiar air of the technical specialist who had no time for mere consumer gadgets. It was ever thus in the GA – beneath us lurked machines of wild and esoteric function, some of them smuggled up from the deep future, but nobody in the joint knew how to change the coffee filter.

The Yak did. So Mary C Rabbitt and I repaired to a sort of threadbare corner couch arrangement while that ancient battle beast made plasticky clacking and pouring noises.

I touched the goldwire in my ear. “Bend away,” I said.

Mary C Rabbitt leaned over and bent my cartilage around, admiring her work. “So they want me to get the gun,” she said.

“The gun?”

The enamel mug went clack on the table. The arms folded. The draftsman-style spectacles affected focus and determination.

“The gun,” said Mary C Rabbitt. “They want me to get, find rather, source as it were, the standard field service rifle.”

The Yak handed me a cup of coffee, so I was able to take a sip and then do a spittake.

“The standard field service rifle?” I spluttered.

“For the standard USGS field worker. Although I think they want us to call them operatives now. It’s a sort of last gasp, you see. Of the Other Bureaux.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake...”

Mary C Rabbitt blanched, but did her best to cover it. “Yes well.”