Authors: John Varley
Then there was Eli Seibel, also awake, pawing through the matchbook covers, paper napkins, torn envelopes, and crumpled papers he is pleased to call his working notes. I never complain to him about it, though I grit my teeth when I see him at work. Out of the chaos he manages to turn in very good work. He’s overweight and allergic to just about everything and the only one of us without a pilot’s license, but he’s cheerful, popular with the secretaries at the office, and competent at his specialty, which is power plants.
In the seats behind me was Tom Stanley, with his feet out in the aisle and the rest of him vainly trying to curl up and get comfortable. At twenty-seven, he’s the youngest member of the team. He’d never been in the service—I suspected he’d have been a draft-dodger if he’d been old enough for Vietnam—and the only aviation-related job he’d held before coming to work for the Board was as an Air Traffic Controller. His family has a lot of money. He started out at Harvard, of all places, before switching to M.I.T., and his dad paid every penny. He lives in a house that’s worth five times what mine would sell for. All in all, I could hardly imagine a biography more calculated to bring out hostility from the likes of old pros like Jerry, Craig…and myself. And that’s pretty much how Haubner and Bannister felt about him. Eli Seibel tolerates him, and Levitsky more or less tolerates all of us.
But I get along with Tom quite well. If there was such a thing
as a second-in-command of an NTSB investigation (which there is not), I would choose Tom Stanley for the post. As it is, I confer with him a lot.
The secret is probably his love of flying. He’s been doing it since he was about eight, and I love flying so much myself that I can’t find it in myself to resent the money that made it possible for him. I own a wonderful old Stearman biplane that swallows too much of my salary and probably will never be paid for. Tom owns a mint-condition Spitfire. And he lets me fly it. What can you say about a man like that?
Tom would be chairing two subgroups in the investigation: Air Traffic Control and Operations. The other person who would wear two hats was asleep in the back of the plane. She was Carole Levitsky, in charge of Human Factors and Witnesses. She’d only been with the Board six months. This would be her second major crash. Originally a research psychologist with experience in forensics and industrial stress factors, she had managed to more or less win over us hard-technology types. I suspect she knew what made us all tick a lot better than we did ourselves; she had a way of looking at you that pretty soon had you thinking “I wonder what I
really
meant by that?” The one thing that still made us all nervous was a lingering suspicion that she spent as much time studying the effects of stress on us as she did on the pilots and ATC’s who figured in the crashes we investigated. As I already mentioned, there were things about myself I’d just as soon keep away from a psychologist, and the rest of us were all fertile ground for job-stress syndrome as well. Carole is a small woman with short, dark hair and a rather plain face. She works well with the overwhelmingly male groups that assemble for an investigation.
There were three team members not present. George Sheppard would look into the weather as a factor leading up to the crash. Then there was Ed Parrish, who normally wasn’t called up to the crash site since his function was Maintenance and Records. He’d be going to Seattle and Los Angeles, where the airframes were built, and to the Maintenance facilities of Pan Am
and United, where he would pore through the mountains of papers filled out every time a commercial jet is worked on. And not even on the go-team list was Victor Thomkins, in charge of the Washington labs where the Cockpit Voice Recorders and Flight Data Recorders would be analyzed.
It was a good team. The only glaring absence was C. Gordon Petcher, who really should have been on the plane with us. Not that he was necessary; I was in charge, whether he was there or not. The field phase of the investigation was my responsibility. But it looked better to have a Board Member present to handle the press. I wondered why he’d elected to wait until morning to fly to the coast?
But I didn’t wonder for long. I was asleep almost as soon as I leaned back in my seat.
* * *
I stepped off the plane, glassy-eyed, into the glare of television lights. They were at the foot of the stairs, crews from as far away as Portland and Santa Barbara. All the bright young men and women were holding mikes out toward us and asking stupid questions.
It’s a ritual; the death-dance of our times. Television news is nothing without pictures, and it hardly matters what the pictures are so long as there’s something to back up the narration. A plane crash presents them with special problems. What they’d have for their next newscast would be some indistinct night-shots of the crash sites—nothing more than twisted wreckage, with an intact wing or tail if they were lucky—some aerial shots of plowed-up ground that didn’t look like much of anything, and shots of the people who flew in from Washington to sort it all out. Of those, a news editor would choose the shots with people in them, so there we were, shuffling between the plane and the helicopter, cameras before us and cameras behind us, wearing artificial smiles and saying nothing.
I got into the copter without even noticing who it belonged to. Inside was a man who stretched out his hand. I looked at it, then took it without any enthusiasm.
“Mr. Smith? I’m Kevin Briley. Roger Keane said I should take you out to the Mount Diablo site as soon as you got here.”
“Okay, Briley,” I said, shouting to be heard over the noise of the chopper. “One, I’m your boss right now, not Keane. Two, I said I wanted security here, and by that I meant keeping the press away from us until we had something to say. You fucked up on that. So three, you’re staying right here. I want you to talk to whoever runs this airport, then look up Sarah Hacker from United and call somebody at Pan Am in New York and tell them what you need, which is some meeting space here in the terminal building, some hangar space somewhere to put what’s left of those two aircraft, and a place to pen up these vultures and
keep them out of my hair.
Then get us some hotel rooms, rent a couple of cars…hell, Briley, talk to Sarah Hacker. She’ll know what needs to be done. She’s been through this before.”
“I haven’t, Mr. Smith.” Briley managed to look belligerent and chagrined at the same time. “What should I tell the reporters? They want to know when they can expect a press conference.”
“Tell them noon today. I doubt like hell there’ll be one by then, but tell ’em anyway. And guess what? You get to catch the flak when it gets postponed.” I grinned at him, and he managed a tired smile and shrug. Maybe he’d hate my guts, and maybe he’d get things done just to spite me. I didn’t mind. He hopped out, and we closed the sliding door on the helicopter. Almost immediately the pilot started up. I looked around. It was a good old Huey, owned and operated by the U.S. Army. Hueys are great, but they tend to be drafty. The pilot wore a sergeant’s stripes.
“How far apart are the two planes?” I asked him.
“About twenty miles, sir.”
“Do you know which one Roger Keane is at? He’s the guy from—”
“I know him, sir. I just took him to the one on Mount Diablo. He said I should bring you there.”
“That’s fine. What’s it like? On the ground.”
“Muddy. It stopped raining about a half hour ago. The trucks are having a lot of trouble getting to it. There’s nothing up there but fire trails.”
* * *
When I found out the DC-10 was not too far out of the route to the 747 crash site, I told the sergeant to detour and fly over it. It wasn’t hard to find.
The DC-10 had made an impact about half a mile north of Interstate 580, not far from Livermore. In what looked to be open fields, hundreds of red and blue lights flashed. Some flame was visible, but the fuel had by then burnt itself out and the damp ground wasn’t going to present any problems. All the pinpoints of light were more or less centered on a dark, circular area.
Obviously, I had known what to expect, but some part of me is still surprised, still asks the stupid question. I was out here to see a plane crash, but
where was the plane?
The pilot brought us down lower, nervously eyeing the myriad lights of other aircraft hovering, landing, or taking off from the vicinity. Still, there was no plane. There were spotlights down there. All they showed was churned up ground and a meaningless confetti of small, shapeless objects, nothing that looked bigger than a hubcap or a car door.
I got a bad feeling looking down at it. Part of it was because it was an unusual site; generally the imprint is a long, messy streak. There will be some recognizable objects strewn along the way, some of them quite large, like engine cowlings, big hunks of wing, part of a fuselage. The mark Flight 35 had left on the ground looked very much like what a bullet would make hitting thick glass: a crater and rays of disturbance.
Flight 35 had literally splashed into the ground.
Testimony of Louise Baltimore
Tell everything, he said.
Fine, but where do I start? The order of events is, at best, a convenient fiction. Seen from another vantage point, things happened very differently. I can hear the universe laughing at me as I try to envision a beginning. However, even us highly evolved mutant-type critters from the seventeenth dimension are, when you get down to it, time-binding apes who live in the eternal Now. No matter how many knots I tie in my lifeline I still move down it the old-fashioned way, in only one direction, taking it one subjective second at a time.
Seen from that perspective, the story begins like this:
* * *
I was jerked awake by the silent alarm vibrating my skull. It won’t shut off until you sit up, so I did.
Mornings had been getting both better and worse than they used to be. Better because I didn’t have that many of them left and valued each new one more. Worse because it was harder to get out of bed.
It would have been easier if I’d allowed myself to sleep plugged in. But you start doing that and before you know it
you’re plugged into more things than you want, so I didn’t. Instead I kept the revitalizer console on the other side of the room and forced myself to make that long walk every morning.
Ten meters.
This time I made the last two meters on my hands and knees. I sat on the floor and plugged the circulator tube into my navel.
That almost makes the walk worth it. I’d been feeling like I’d shrunk inside my skinsuit. Then the go-juice reached my heart and I practically exploded. I could feel the tingling spread down my limbs. The sludge I use for blood was being replaced with something that’s half fluorocarbons and half mountain dew. I guarantee it’ll get the sleepy dust out of your eyes.
I said, “Listen up, motherfucker.”
And the Big Computer answered, “What the hell do you want?”
No toadying servomannerisms for me. When I accessed, I wanted to feel like I was talking to something at least as nasty as I was. Everybody I know likes to have the BC simper at them like a receptionist or baritone its words like a wide-screen Jehovah. Not me. The BC obliges by seeming to barely tolerate me.
“Why’d you get me out of bed? You owe me three hours’ sleep.”
“A problem has come up in connection with an operation in progress. Since you are Chief of Snatch Team Operations, someone at the Gate had the foolish notion you could be of help straightening it out. No doubt he was wrong, judging—”
“Shut up. How bad?”
“Terrible.”
“How soon…how much time do I have?”
“In the philosophical or the practical sense? You have no time. You should have been there half an hour ago.”
* * *
If it had said fifteen minutes ago I think I might have made it.
I pulled on a pair of ersatz twentieth-century jeans. I stopped
in the bathroom long enough to buzz my teeth clean and choose some hair (blonde, this time) and see if my face was on straight. Say five seconds for the teeth and hair, and six seconds at the mirror. That was an extravagant waste of time, but I like mirrors. They lie so fetchingly these days.
You beautiful fraud, you.
I grinned at myself. It would most likely be the last chance I had to grin all day.
Then I was out the door, bowling over Sherman the houseboy on the way out. He spilled his breakfast tray.
I ran barefoot down the hall, fell down the drop tube, hurried to the slidewalk and ran on that, too, pushing the more sedate drones out of my way. I reached the speedcaps and got into one. I punched in the code for the Gate, sank into the padding and took a deep breath, then me and the capsule arched out over the city like a high pop fly to centerfield.
Faster than that I cannot hurry. I relaxed and watched the buildings slide by beneath me, not really giving it my attention. It wasn’t until then that I remembered this was the day. One of my messages was coming due at the Post Office.
I looked at my Lady Bulova and frowned. There were still several hours before I could open the time capsule. Which meant it was not likely to have a bearing on
this
crisis, whatever it was. We seldom see a crisis at the Gate that isn’t resolved within two or three hours.
Which meant I could expect
another
crisis before the day was out.
Sometimes I wonder why I get up.
* * *
My capsule was fielded by the retarder rings. When I decapsulated I hurried into the Gate complex and down the corridor to Operations. The gnomes sat there in the blue and green light from their consoles, which filled up a huge horseshoe gallery overlooking the activity on the floor beneath them. Operations was glassed in, insulating it from the sounds of the things happening below.
God, how I hate the gnomes. Every time I went to Operations
I could smell their putrefaction. It was nonsense, of course; I was smelling my own fear. In another year or so I’d be behind a console. I’d be
built in
to a console, with all my guts on the outside and nothing left of my body but the Big Lie. I’m twenty percent fake, myself. They’re more like eighty percent.