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

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