In an Islandia hotel, a psychiatrist wearing a lapel pin with the words "crisis team" on it wore an uneasy expression as he waited for the arrival of the families of the victims of TWA Flight 800 Thursday. What will you tell them? he was asked. "I can't imagine anything worse than this," he replied. Are you nervous about meeting them? "Yeah. Yeah, I am."

At Westhampton Beach, children chased one another in the surf while their parents sat on folding chairs, staring with the same uneasy expression into the haze that was all that separated their summer day from the tragedy in the waters beyond. "I don't like looking at the water today," said a mother, "but I have to watch the kids."

At the morgue in Hauppauge, a rabbi sat waiting, too. He recited the Psalms of the Old Testament to help soothe the souls of the dead, he said.

What do you do when you finish the 150 Psalms? he was asked. "Then I start over again," he said.

In the faces of all the people who helped, or tried, or just wanted to help - from the Coast Guardsmen to the governor to the clergymen to the people at the beach nearby in the middle of their lives -- there were signs of vacancy, impotence and shock Thursday in the wake of this disaster.

And what else could they show?

The governor thanked the Coast Guard, the Suffolk and Nassau county governments, New York City and the State Police for their efforts in responding to the crash of the plane with 230 people on board. The mayor said it was "wonderful" how well the web of helping had worked.

What else could they say? This was an unmitigated disaster, and we are beyond knowing what to do. Politicians don't say that. Just as well.

All that anyone could do was collect the remains and the possessions of the dead and treat them with utmost respect, which they did. They collected bodies and limbs, shoes and shaving kits. They took in a bundle of letters bound with a thick rubber band. They retrieved a white teddy bear, a woman's brown leather coat, a book of poetry, a postcard with German writing on it, a framed picture of a small black dog -- like punctuation points with no words to connect them anymore.

A TWA vice president recited useless numbers: The captain had flown 18,791 hours as a pilot for TWA, 5,471 of them as the pilot of 747s. The plane left the gate at 8:02 p.m. It left the runway at 8:19. It dropped from the radar at 8:48. Flight 800's total number of non-routine transmissions: zero.

The waters off East Moriches were calm Thursday. Floating objects log-jammed together in clumps on the surface, though the "debris stream," as the helicopter pilots and Coast Guardsmen called it, steadily expanded throughout the day.

"There were empty life vests floating, and some people . . . " said a helicopter pilot employed by a local TV station, interviewed in the coffee shop at Gabreski Airport in Westhampton. He ate a cheeseburger and a slice of watermelon while taking a break before returning to the air.

On the sand at Westhampton Beach, a man sunbathing looked up from beneath his umbrella. A business associate's niece had been on Flight 800, he said. She and her husband were accompanying two young French exchange students back to Paris.

"They left their own two children, 5 and 7, with her father in Atlanta," said the man, who identified himself as Robert Friess of Stony Brook. "I'll tell you what they should do."

Nearby, at the lifeguard station, some people were arguing about whether the blood in the water off shore would attract sharks.

"They should find the people who did this, and kill them. And if it happens again, find those responsible and kill them, too. And keep killing them until they get the point."

How do we know someone did this?

"Find them," he said. "And kill them."

He wore the same expression as all the others Thursday -- that same uneasy, shocked, vacant expression.