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

deaf in one ear and wears a hearing aid in the other. Looking at him, you'd think he was the
biggest mistake the Army ever made. I'd put him up against a platoon of German soldiers
any day, even at age sixty. He's got one of those craggy faces and a pair of those giant
hands that would make him look right at home in a machine shop. It's hard to picture him at
a drawing board or putting a model through wind-tunnel tests, but that's what he's good at.
After the war he put himself through college. He worked on the DC-6 and the DC-8, among
many others.
He was sound asleep, head back, mouth open. The guy is almost nerveless; nothing
rattles him. He collects stamps, of all things. He's nutty about philately; once he starts
talking about it it's impossible to shut him off.
Behind him, his bald head gleaming in the cone of light from overhead, was Craig
Haubner, my systems specialist. He would spend the rest of the flight filling page after page
of his yellow legal tablet, bounce off the plane and out to the crash site and spend all day
and into the night poking and peering into the wreckage, and return to the temporary
headquarters still neat, alert, and full of energy. It was impossible to like Haubner -- he
wasn't very good with people, and sometimes didn't even seem to be human -- but we all
respected him. His ability to examine a bit of charred wire or bent hydraulic tubing and tell
exactly what happened to it is little short of the occult.
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 powerplants.
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 Viet-Nam -- 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 sub-groups 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