Millennium

We looked each other over. Maybe he knew what I was thinking; I had a pretty good idea what was going through his head. He didn't want this crash pi

"Where's Janz?"

"He's at home, and he's under sedation. Naturally, he's very upset. I think I heard him talking about finding a lawyer."

"Naturally. Can you have him here in two hours?"

"Is that an order?"

"I can't give you orders, Carpenter. I'm asking you. He can bring his lawyer if he wants to.

But you know I'll have to talk to him sooner or later. And you know how rumors get started.

If your boy isn't at fault -- and somehow, looking at you, I get the feeling you don't think he is -- isn't it better to let me hear his story now?"

Tom had been trying to catch my eye, so I glanced over at him and ht picked up the spiel without a pause.

"Ian, we're ninety-nine percent sure the problem wasn't with the planes. Weather seems unlikely. You been listening to the talk around here. You know what's been said. It's pilot error, controller error ... or computer error. If you get your man in here, it mind go a long way toward getting us off on the right foot."

Carpenter had glanced up at the mention of computer error; something was smouldering inside the man, but I didn't know what it was. He looked back at his shoes, still undecided.

"The press is going to want some answers, Carpenter. If they don't get at least a hint soon, they'll start to speculate. You know where that's going to lead."

He glared at me, but I don't think I was really the target of his anger.

"All right. I'll have him here in two hours."

He turned on his heel and marched away. I looked at Tom.

"What was that all about?"

"He told me the air traffic computer was out when the planes hit. It was the third overload that day."

"No shit."

It was too early to tell if it was a break, but it was the first thing I'd heard so far that interested me.

"What the hell time is it, anyway?" I asked Tom.

"I've got oh-seven-hundred."

"Is that East Coast, or West Coast? You want to go out to the hangar, see what they've got going out there?"

Tom knew me, I guess. Maybe I'm obvious.

"How about finding a bar first?"

Bars are never hard to find around big airports, and California isn't a state that's too stuffy about the hours. There was no trouble finding a drink at seven in the morning.

I ordered a double scotch on the rocks and Tom had Perrier or sarsaparilla, or whatever it is non-drinkers drink. Whatever it was, it bubbled like the dickens and gave me a headache just to watch it.

"What else did you learn while I was stuck with Mister Briley?"

"Not a lot. Mostly that Carpenter's going to make a case that his men are working too many hours, and the computers are too old, and they can't be expected to make the switchover when the computer goes out."

"We've heard that before."

"And the Board said the hours weren't too long."

"I wasn't on that particular investigation. I read the report."

Tom didn't say anything. He knew my opinion about that report. I think he shared it, though it's not something I'd ever ask him. I've got enough seniority to shoot off my mouth every once in a while if I think somebody's pulling a fast one. I don't expect him to join my subversive opinions, at least not publicly.

"Okay. When did the computer go down?"

"About the worst possible moment, according to Carpenter. Janz was handling something like nineteen planes. The computer shuts down, he's faced with a soft display and he's got about ten seconds to match blip A with blip A prime. Two of those blips were jets he was about ready to hand over to Oakland approach control. He couldn't figure out which was which, and he told each of them exactly the wrong thing. He thought he was steering them away from a collision. What he was doing was guiding them toward each other."

I could see it in my head. Trouble is, it's a hard thing to explain unless you've actually been in an Air Region Traffic Control Center when the computer goes down. ("m sorry to say that I've seen it happen many times.

One minute you're looking at a sharp, clear circular screen with a lot of lines and a lot of dots on it. Each dot is labeled with several rows of numbers. It may baffle you if you've never seen it before, but to a trained ATC those numbers identify each aircraft and tell a lot about them. Things like altitude, air speed, transponder I.D. number. The picture is generated by a computer, which updates the screen once every couple of seconds. You can play with it, adjust it so each plane leaves a little trail of successively dimmer blips, so you know where the plane has been and have some idea of where it's going, just by looking. You can tell the computer to erase extraneous stuff and just let you deal with a problem situation. You've got a little cursor you can move across the screen to touch a particular aircraft, and talk to the pilot. If two planes get into a situation, the computer will see it before you do and ring a bell to let you know you'd better turn them away from each other.

Then the computer overloads. It shuts down.

You know what happens then? The screen falls from a vertical to a horizontal position. There's a good reason for that: the blips you see are no longer labeled. You have to get out little plastic chips called shrimp boats, which you label with a grease pencil and lay beside each blip. When the blip moves, you move the shrimp boat. The screen resolution goes to hell. It's like you're not even looking at the same scene. It's as if you'd dropped out of the computer age back to the infancy of radar, like they had to work with in World War Two.

As if that weren't enough, the blips you see on the new, longwave display may not be in the same positions as they were before. The uncorrected radar-reflection imaging is nothing like the computer-corrected display. Where you had tasteful little hatch marks to indicate clouds -- all carefully labeled for altitude -- now you've got a horrendous splotch of white noise that isn't anywhere near where you thought it would be.

If it happens during an off-hour, the controllers simply groan and break out the shrimp boats. If it happens during a rush -- and in an ARTCC like Oakland-San Francisco, with three commercial and three military and God-knows-how-many private airfields it's usually a rush -- there are two or three minutes of desperate silence as the ATC's figure out who's who and try to remember where everybody was and if anybody was approaching what they call a "situation."

I'm not a big fan of euphemisms, but situation was a good one. What we have here, folks, is a situation where six hundred people are about to be spread all over a mountain like a family-sized can of tomato paste.

"What do you think?" I asked Tom.

"It's too early. You know that." Still, he kept looking at me, and he knew I was asking for an off-the-record call. He gave it to me.

"I think it's going to be tough. We've got a guy who's almost a trainee, and a computer built in 1968. That's practically the stone age, these days. But some folks are going to say Janz should have been able to cope. Everybody else does."

"Yeah. Let's get out to the hangar."