The Last Age.

I got up and wandered from the Operations room. I found some clothes and got dressed, had breakfast from machines in the Snatch Team Ready-Room, and just sat for a while. I realized the day was still young.

So far it had been pretty typical.

Testimony of Bill Smith

The chopper pilot told me Roger Keane had already spent three hours at the DC-10 site.

I wasn't quite sure what to do. We had two big planes separated by twenty miles, and seven people to begin the investigation. What I saw below me was unpromising. In the absence of any better guidelines, I turned to my team and polled them.

"I'd like to get out here," Eli said. He'd been looking down at what might have been one of the engine cowlings, and I could see he was eager to get his hands on it. "I mean, what's the difference? We'll see them both eventually so I might as well start here."

"I'll get off, too," Carole said. "It's close enough to those farmhouses that I might get some useful eyewitness accounts. Isn't the other one up on top of a mountain?"

"Yes, ma'am," the pilot said. "Mount Diablo. I doubt anyone was close when it came down."

Craig and Jerry said they'd just as soon start here, too, which left me and Tom Stanley.

"Keep your eyes open for the recorders," I told Craig as he was getting out. The pilot heard me.

"You mean the black boxes?" he asked. "They already got those. I flew 'em back to Oakland an hour ago."

I nodded at him, and jerked my thumb into the air. How the Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder got nicknamed black boxes has always been a minor mystery to me.

For one thing, they're usually red. To me, a "Black box" has always been some esoteric gizmo that does something mysterious. The CVR's and FDR's were perfectly straightforward devices. Anybody who could run a car stereo could understand them.

It looked like the 747 had flown a little after the collision. It had plowed a long furrow up the side of the mountain.

Tom and I reconstructed it from the air, hovering over a site that was not nearly so crowded as the other, and which had much more to tell us.

The plane had come in on its belly. The impact had demolished the nose, and probably cracked the fuselage. It had bounced, then bellied down again, and this time the fuselage broke into four distinct sections, each of which had rolled end over end. There were big hunks of wing to be seen. The engines had been stripped away and were not visible from the air. But the cockpit seemed almost intact, though blackened by fire. That's the thing that makes the 747 unique among commercial airliners; instead of being perched out at the nose -- "first to the scene of the accident," as the pilots like to say -- the flight crew of a, 747 sit high atop everything and well back.

The other large piece we saw was the broken-off vertical stabilizer, still attached to the rear section of the fuselage. That looked good for the flight recorders. I thought I could see a group of people working around it, and asked the pilot if he could set us down there. He said it was too risky, and took us to the assembly area, where a dozen fire trucks and police cars and a handful of ambulances had begun to gather.

It's not like Mount Diablo was really remote. If a single plane had come down there it would already have been crawling with workers. But the other plane had come down in full view of the freeway and had quickly drawn off the lion's share of the available rescue workers. As soon as it was determined there were no survivors from the 747 and thus no real hurry, Roger Keane had decided to concentrate the clean-up at the more accessible site.

Before we were even out from beneath the helicopter rotor a big guy in a yellow raincoat was coming toward us with his hand out.

"Bill Smith?" he said, and grabbed my hand. "Chuck Willis, CHP. Mister Keane's over at the tail section. He told me to bring you up as soon as you got here."

I had time to recall that CHP meant California Highway Patrol, and to attempt to introduce Tom Stanley, but the guy was already off. We followed, and I glanced back to see yellow body bags being loaded into the helicopter we had just left. I didn't envy the pilot his trip back to town. The whole place smelled of jet fuel and charred meat.

We were halfway to the tail section when Tom said, "Excuse me," turned aside, and threw up.

I stopped and waited for him. In a moment, Willis of the CHP noticed he was no longer being followed, and he stopped, too, and looked back at us impatiently.

The funny thing was, I didn't feel queasy until Tom got sick. I never could stand to see someone vomit. I had forgotten that about Tom. I'd been to some bad ones with him -- small planes, but with really awful corpses. Most of the time he'd been okay, but once or twice he'd lost it.

What can I say? We had been walking through plowed-up ground with the main wreckage still ahead of us, but there had been many bodies, or parts of bodies. l honestly hadn't seen them. I'd gone around them. Thinking back, I recalled actually stepping over one.

But at the time, it was as if they didn't exist. It was an ability I'd developed. We were here to look at wreckage, at wire and metal and so forth, so my mind simply ignored the human wreckage.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Sure," he said, straightening up. And I knew from past experience that he would be.

Well, if a guy's got to throw up, so what? It didn't matter to me.

I could tell Willis didn't think much of it, though. I derided that if he told us he'd seen worse on the California highways, I'd sock him.

He didn't say anything. Pretty soon I could see why.

The place was crawling with people in various uniforms. Most of them were firemen and police and paramedics from towns in the area, men who thought they were used to seeing violent death. They were finding out how wrong they were. Some of them would be going to psychiatrists for years because of the things they saw that night. There's a syndrome associated with working at the site of an airliner crash and seeing things your mind doesn't want to deal with. It can hit very hard at professional people who think they're ready for anything, who have an image of themselves as tough and experienced. They just aren't ready for the scale of the thing.

I saw several firemen stumbling around like sleepwalkers. One guy in a CHP uniform was sitting down, crying like a child. He'd probably come out of it okay. It was the guys who held it in, who played it tough to the end, that would eventually need help.

At least we didn't have any zombies around. I saw some at San Diego, where the plane came down in the middle of a neighborhood. There was no way to keep people away at first, and some really sick cases were drawn to the site before the police could get it cleared. Some of them picked up pieces of bodies for souvenirs, if you can believe that. I didn't want to, but a guy at PSA swore to me it was true. He said a cop came within an inch of shooting one of these guys who was making off with somebody's leg.

And why should it be such a surprise? Nothing draws a crowd like a big disaster. If a freeway smash-up was fun, an airplane crash ought to be a hundred times as much fun.

Crashes are like tornadoes. They play ugly tricks. I've seen severed heads, unmarked, hanging from tree branches at eye level. Sometimes there are hands clasping each other, a man's and a woman's, or a woman's and a child's. Just the hands, still hanging on when the rest of the bodies have been thrown elsewhere.