"John Varley - Millennium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

L.A. a little bit longer, if you want to talk to him."
I glanced at my watch.
"In a minute. Where's George?"
"I don't know. He got the call. We tried him five minutes ago and there was no answer."
George Sheppard is the weather specialist. We could take off without him, since his
presence at the crash site wasn't absolutely necessary.
And I was ready to go. More: I was aching to go, like a skittish race horse in the starting
gate. I could feel it building all around me, and all around the nation. The interior of the
JetStar was dark and calm, but from Washington to Los Angeles and Seattle, and soon all
around the world, forces were gathering that would produce the goddamdest electronic
circus anyone ever saw. The nation slept, but the wire services and the coaxial cables and
synchronous satellites were humming with the news. A thousand reporters and editors were
being roused from bed, booking flights to Oakland. A hundred government agencies were
going to be involved before this thing was over. Foreign governments would send
representatives. Everyone from Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas to the manufacturer of the
smallest rivet in an airframe would be on edge, wondering if their factory had turned out the
offending part or written the fatal directive, and they'd all want to be on hand to hear the
bad news as it happened. By the time the sun came up in California a billion people would be
clamoring for answers. How did this happen? Whose fault is it? What should be done about
it? And I was the guy who had to provide those answers. Every nerve in my body was crying
out to get in the air, get there, and start looking.
I was about to order the take-off when a call came in from George, sparing me a decision
that he'd surely have resented. He was having car trouble. He'd called a taxi, but suggested
we'd better take off without him and he'd catch up later. I heaved a sigh of relief and told
the pilot to get us out of here.


What's it like on your way to a major airline disaster? Fairly quiet, for the most part.
During the first hour I made a few calls to Los Angeles, spoke briefly to Kevin Briley. I
learned that Roger Keane had boarded a helicopter and was surely at the DC-10 site by
now.
Briley was about to leave to catch his own flight to Oakland, where he would meet me at
the airport. I told him to set up security.
Then some of the others made calls to Seattle, Oakland, Schenectady, Denver, Los
Angeles. Each of the go-team members would be forming his own team to look into one
aspect of the crash, and each wanted to get the best possible people. Usually that was no
problem. The grapevine operates quickly in a crash this size. Almost everyone we called had
already heard; many were already on their way. These were people we knew and trusted.
But none of that took very long. After that first hour we were alone in the sky on the five-
hour flight to Oakland. So what did we do? Do you have any idea how much paper work is
involved in an accident investigation? Each of us had half a dozen reports in progress. There
were reports to read and reports to write, and endless items to review. My own briefcase
bulged with pending work. I did some of it for an hour or so.
Finally I wasn't understanding what I was reading. I yawned, stretched, and looked
around me. Half the team was asleep. That struck me as a fine idea. It was 4:30 in the
morning, Eastern time, three hours earlier on the West Coast, and none of us were likely to
get any sleep until well past midnight.
Across the aisle was Jerry Bannister, in charge of structures. He's the oldest of us: a big
man with a huge head and thick gray hair, an aeronautical engineer who got his start on the
Douglas assembly line building Gooney Birds because the Army recruiter rejected him. He's