Millennium

Sure, he's afraid. At least the ones I've talked to who made it through say they felt something that was an awful lot like fear. But his job is to keep the thing in the air, and he's still doing his job when he hits.

You can define heroism any way you want, but that's it for me. It's sticking in there no matter what. Whether it's a pilot fighting his plane down through that last mile, or switchboard operators and doctors and nurses staying at their posts while the bombs blitz London, or even the dance band on the Titanic playing while the ship goes down ...

It's fulfilling your responsibilities.

The room was silent for a while. Nobody could think of anything to say. Rockwell hadn't said anything deathless, anything quotable as being a heroic thing to say, but no one wanted to spoil the moment.

That's my job.

"Let's hear the other tape," I said, and everyone began murmuring at once. I glanced to my left, where a stenographer from United was sitting with a notepad in her lap. She was pale and her eyes were shiny. I gave her a smile that I meant m tell her it's okay, I understand, but from the way she looked at me she probably thought l was leering at her. My face is like that, sad to report. I'm told I usually look a little mean, or a little excited.

"They're still working on the other," Eli said. He looked meaningfully over at Janz, flanked by his protectors. I sighed, and went to him.

I dragged a chair around and straddled it, facing him I was introduced to his attorney, but I'm afraid the name has gone clear out of my head.

You can't run an investigation without lawyers. They'd soon be as thick as maggots in a week-old carcass.

"I had both 35 and 880 where I wanted them," Janz said, dully. He kept looking at his hands, clasped in his lap. You couldn't help thinking, looking at him, that the guy would fall over any minute. His eyelids kept drooping, then they'd jerk open and he'd study his hands some more. He had two ways of talking: too fast, and too slow. We'd get a burst of something, then he'd sit there looking vague and mumbling things we couldn't understand.

"And where was that, Don?" I said, encouragingly.

"Huh?"

"In what order? They were both going toward an approach at Oakland, right? Which one were you going to hand over first?"

"Uh ... " His eyes got spacey.

I should have known better. The lawyer cleared his throat again. We'd already listened to a lecture about how this whole interview was against his advice, and at several points he'd broken in, accusing me of manhandling his client. Manhandling! He was a lousy jerk in a three-piece suit, and dammit, I knew better than to push this kid. My big fear was that he'd start to cry.

"Okay, counselor," I said, holding up my hands. "No more questions, okay? I'll just sit back and listen." It was probably the best course, anyway. Questions just seemed to befuddle Janz.

"You were saying, Don?"

It took him a few minutes to recall where we'd been.

"Oh, right. Which one was ahead. I ... I ... can't remember."

"It's not important. Go ahead."

"Huh? Oh, okay."

He showed no inclination to do so, then started to talk rapidly again.

"I think there were fifteen commercial flights on my board. I don't know how many private planes. Some military ... it was a fast night, but we were doing okay, I was on top of it. I brought them in, and I could see they were going to get close, but I'd have plenty of time to straighten them out.

"Not a collision course. No way. Even if they'd never heard from me again, they should have missed each other by ... oh, four, five miles.

"So I gave 35 a ... it was a right turn. Just a hair. I was feeling .pretty good about it, since I'd just made a bigger hole behind 35 for somebody else ... ah, it was PSA something-or-

other from ... ah, Bakersfield. Eleven-oh-one, that was it."

He smiled faintly, remembering how neatly he'd done it. Then his face fell apart.

"That's when the computer dropped out.

"I got real busy. I think I sort of put 35 and 880 in the back of my mind; I'd just dealt with them, and I knew they were okay. I had another situa -- There were a couple other aircraft ... uh, a couple others that needed looking after just then." Janz looked at Carpenter. "How long did the computer stay down?"

"Nine minutes," Carpenter said, quietly.

"Nine minutes." Janz shrugged. "Time sort of gets mixed up. I had 'em all labeled ... " He looked up at me, puzzled. "You know what it's like when the computer goes down? You know how we -- "

"I know," I said. "You go back to manual marking."

"Right. Manual." He laughed, with no humor. "They didn't tell me it was go

"I know," I said. I was visualizing him trying to switch from one system to another, with inadequate data.

"Well, the computer was still slow. It wasn't real-time yet."

"It hardly ever is," Carpenter said, with a scowl directed at me.

The lawyer looked confused, and I thought he was about to make an objection. He was obviously out of his depth, and didn't know if he ought to let his client talk on about things he couldn't advise him about. Carpenter noticed it, and shook his head "Don't worry," he said. "Don's just saying the computer was ru

I could tell from Carpenter's look that he had a pretty good idea who to blame, but he wouldn't say anything just now. The lawyer seemed satisfied.

Janz didn't seem to have noticed the exchange. He was still back there in the ARTCC, coping with a new situation.

"Right off, I could see three-five and eight-eighty were problem. They weren't close enough yet to set off the alarm, but they were getting that way. Or at least, considering the computer lagtime, I didn't think they were in trouble yet. But they weren't were they ought to be.

"They were on the wrong side of each other. Damn it, I couldn't figure out how the fuckers had passed each other like that. It didn't seem like they'd had enough time, no matter how bad my course figures were. But 35 should have been north of 880, and it was the other way around. And they were drifting back toward each other."

He put his head in his hands again, and shook it slowly.

"There wasn't a hell of a lot of time to make the decision. I figured they had about three minutes. But the fucking crash alarm wasn't going off, and I couldn't figure that, either. I turned them away from each other damn quick, and figured I'd sort it out later, in the incident report.

"That's when they switched places."

I looked up, and over at Carpenter. He nodded grimly at me.

"You're saying, Don, that the computer had mislabeled the two planes?"

He was nodding.

"Just for a couple of sweeps. I don't know ... transponder trouble, simultaneous signals ..

. what the hell. Whatever happened, for a minute there the computer was telling me the Pan Am was the United and the United was the Pan Am." He looked up at me for the first time, and in his eyes was a terrible emptiness.

"And ... see, what I had to do ... from what the computer was saying ... " He choked, but struggled on. "See, I tried to turn them away from each other. But since they were exactly reversed on my screen, what I ended up telling them to do was to steer straight toward each other."