I've been to crashes where they were just letting relatives wander through the morgue lifting up the comers of blankets. There's no way you can make it pretty or easy to stomach, but there are limits. Here, they were mostly going by personal effects. In a separate room they had lines of tables covered with burnt clothing and jewelry, all tagged as to which corpse it had been taken from. A lot of people were looking through this stuff Tom and I were looking for Freddie Powers, the agent who had called us to the morgue in the first place. We spotted him on the far side of the property room. He's more or less your standard Texas blond-headed collegiate G-man, tall and conservatively dressed.
"Hello, Bill. Tom. Got something over here you might like to see." Not too long ago he'd have said "Howdy." They say you can't take the Texas out of the boy, but Freddie was working on it. His drawl was practically gone.
"Bill Smith, Tom Stanley, this is Jeff Brindle." Brindle was a short, curly-haired intern in his late twenties, dressed in a bloody smock. He had a quick smile and slightly buck teeth.
"Jeff put all this together and brought it to my attention," Freddie went on. I thought he was looking a little uncomfortable. Strictly speaking, he was here to put names on stiffs; maybe he was afraid he was encroaching into my territory. Or maybe it was something else.
"Actually, I don't know if it means a damn thing, but it sure as hell is funny," Brindle contributed. He glanced at Freddie. "You want me to show them?"
"I wish somebody would," I said.
Freddie nodded, and picked up a man's wristwatch. It was a Timex on an expansion band.
The band was stained with dried blood and the crystal was cracked, but you could see the second hand still moving.
"Takes a licking and keeps on ticking," Freddie drawled. I looked up at him. With Freddie, when the drawl gets thick, the kicker is on the way. I looked down at the watch. It read 10:45 and some seconds. I glanced at my own watch and saw that it was actually a couple seconds shy of 10 A.M.
"I've got ten and about eighteen seconds," Tom said.
Freddie beckoned me a few feet down the table, where he'd arranged about twenty watches. I leaned over and examined them.
Several things could be seen at once. They were all working, though some had completely lost the glass. They all showed the same time -- 10:45. There was something else about the group, but it eluded me for a moment.
"They're all mechanical," Tom put in. Of course, that was it.
Freddie didn't say anything. He just led me to a second group o f watches.
There were a lot more of these, though I could see down the table that the bulk of the weird exhibit was still to come. I sighed, and looked down.
Again, all mechanical. None of them were working. Some were so badly melted they might have been scraped off a Salvador Dali painting. But of the ones that were still readable, none had a time later than ten o'clock. The great bulk of them read 9:56, exactly.
"The planes hit the ground at 9:11," Freddie said.
"And eleven and forty-five is fifty-six. They're forty-five minutes fast, like the others.
What else have you got?"
He seemed to realize I was getting impatient, because he hurried through the next part.
"These four here, also mechanical, are reading 1:45. Still running. And over here we've got a dozen stopped mechanicals that all read 12:56."
"These people hadn't set their watches back to Pacific time yet," Tom suggested.
"That's the way I read it."
I thought it over. I couldn't think of anything real intelligent to say, but I had to try something.
"Are these from one plane, or both?"
"Both. Most from the 747 -- I doubt we'll ever find all of them from the DC-10. But those we did get from the DC-10 agree with the rest."
It was Tom who finally put into words what we'd all been wondering.
"Who sets their watch forty-five minutes ahead?"
I sure couldn't think up a good reason, much less explain why two planeloads of people would all get the same brilliant idea "Thanks, Freddie," I said, starting away from him. "I don't know what it means yet, but we'll sure look into it."
Freddie was looking a little guilty.
"That's not quite all, Bill," he said. I should have realized. He led me further down the table, to where a large number of digital watches were arranged. They all had blank or broken or melted faces.
"Maybe the old-fashioned stuff's the best," Freddie said. "At least the gear-and-
mainspring equipment came through better than these things did. But we did get a couple of survivors. Like this one."
He held out an undamaged Seiko and I glanced at it. It had constant day/date display, and a second indicator silently flicking out the numbers in its inscrutable digital way. The time read 3:14, December the 11th.
"This one's really screwed up," I said. "It's not even close to the others."
"You're telling me," Freddie said. "It's 'cause it's counting in a way I'd call a little odd.
Take another look."
I did, and this time I really looked at the seconds.
Forty, thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-seven ...
I plunked it down on the table.
"Goddam it, Freddie, every crash I ever saw plays crazy tricks, one way or another. All those watches reading forty-five minutes fast, now that's something I'll buy as having a bearing on the crash. Or at least it might. But one watch that's gone haywire and is running backwards ... shit."
Freddie sighed.
"I'd agree with you, pal, but for a couple of things. One of them is that I've had some electronics training and I couldn't figure out what would make one of these go backwards. I mean, anything that would knock it that far out of kilter would destroy the whole chip, you know what I mean?"
I didn't, but these days nobody likes to admit they're ignorant about any part of computer science, else you start looking like an old biplane fogey. So I shrugged.
"You said a couple of things. What's the others?"
He just held out his hand and let me look. There were three other digital watches there.
All of them read 3:13, and all were counting backwards.
Donald Janz was in terrible shape. He looked like there was more Valium than blood in his veins. He was just a kid -- no more than twenty-five, younger than Tom Stanley -- dressed in a rumpled white shirt with the tie pulled askew. He kept tugging at his mustache and scratching at his nose, covering his face one way or another. He was sitting between Ian Carpenter of the Union sorry, 'Association' -- and somebody who l thought for a minute was Melvin Belli, but turned out to be just a hopeful imitator. He couldn't have looked more like a lawyer if he had the word stenciled on his forehead..
We were back in the small conference room at the Oakland airport and it was getting on toward two in the afternoon. All I'd had that day was a donut and a ham sandwich so my stomach wasn't in the greatest shape, but they finally had the DC-10 tape ready to play and I wanted to do it while Janz was there to listen.
It's not strictly going by the book to play the cockpit voice tape at the investigation site.
The actual tape was already on its way to Washington. There the Board maintains sophisticated machines that clean up, enhance, and analyze the usually awful recordings we get off CVR's. It takes a couple weeks putting the tapes through that mill. So I sometimes have a copy made before sending it off. That's what we'd be listening to.
The room had been cleared of reporters. I started out by watching Janz as it was played, but soon I was engrossed.
Somebody said: "United three-five, this is Oakland. I have you at twenty-three thousand, descending to fifteen. There is traffic below you, bearing ... " and so forth. I saw Janz jump at the sound of his own voice. At least, though I'd never heard him speak, I assumed it was him.