Catch As Catch Can by Joseph Heller

Author:Joseph Heller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

4

Nearby in the White House, the president was just finishing up his packing on the final day of final decision.

“Aren’t you going to dress?”

George Bush said no to his friend as he completed his last preparations before departing officially. “That’s another one of the great retirement benefits of being just plain George,” he stated jauntily. He was attired casually in khaki chino trousers, a box-plaid flannel shirt of red and black, and a sleeveless shooting jacket with game pouches, into which he had set carefully a number of the citations and awards he’d been packing. He gazed quizzically at another one of the paper emblems of office he was on the verge of folding away. “Say, Charlie,” he inquired pensively, “what do you know about heavy water?”

“Nothing. Why? It’s got something to do with nuclear reactions, doesn’t it?”

“We’ve got a guy who’s producing it, an American. A chaplain, no less. A retired chaplain from the old army air force back in World War II.”

“Make him stop. What’s the problem?”

“He can’t stop. He’s producing it sort of, if you know what I mean, biologically.”

“Biologically? No, I don’t know what you mean.”

“That’s what it says in this memo, code name Tap Water. He eats and drinks like the rest of us, but what comes out of him is, I guess, heavy water.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. That so?”

“That’s what they tell me is so. It seems he was researched and developed by Milo Minderbinder of the Double-M E&A company, who claims to have an option on him.”

“I know about Milo Minderbinder. I’ve known about Milo Minderbinder for a long time.”

“And our intelligence agencies tell us this chaplain was in close contact with another M&M man named Yossarian before we took him into custody. Another former air-corps man, a captain.”

“Yossarian?”

“Yes, he talks to the chaplain’s wife regularly. Nothing dirty between them yet. He talks to a registered nurse too, and she may also be involved. There may be a Belgian connection. ‘The Belgian is swallowing,’ she said to Yossarian the last time they spoke.”

“Yossarian?” repeated Charlie Stubbs. “You’re saying Yossarian?”

“You know him? You want his first name?”

“How many Yossarians could there be? I knew about Yossarian when I was back in Pianosa during the war, before they transferred me to the Pacific. He was a bombardier, right? He was a little bit crazy then.”

“Crazy?”

“That’s what everybody thought. I remember saying to someone during a very bad time there that I thought that crazy son of a gun Yossarian was the only sane one of us left.”

“Dangerous?”

“I wouldn’t think so. Not normally. Where’ve you got this chaplain? I may know him too.”

“In a cellar. With lead-lined walls.”

“What can you do about him?”

“Oh, any one of our counterterrorist intelligence units can kill him easily, if it ever comes to that. But he may be valuable. We’re having a problem with our heavy water, you know. And with our tritium too.”

“What’s tritium?”

“The gas we get from it, it says here. And we need that for our nuclear warheads.

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