'I never lie!' Milo rejoindered with proud dignity.
'You're lying now.'
'I only lie when it's necessary,' Milo explained defensively, averting his eyes for a moment and blinking his lashes winningly. 'This stuff is better than cotton candy, really it is. It's made out of real cotton. Yossarian, you've got to help me make the men eat it. Egyptian cotton is the finest cotton in the world.'
'But it's indigestible,' Yossarian emphasized. 'It will make them sick, don't you understand? Why don't you try living on it yourself if you don't believe me?'
'I did try,' admitted Milo gloomily. 'And it made me sick.' The graveyard was yellow as hay and green as cooked cabbage. In a little while the chaplain stepped back, and the beige crescent of human forms began to break up sluggishly, like flotsam. The men drifted without haste or sound to the vehicles parked along the side of the bumpy dirt road. With their heads down disconsolately, the chaplain, Major Major and Major Danby moved toward their jeeps in an ostracized group, each holding himself friendlessly several feet away from the other two.
'It's all over,' observed Yossarian.
'It's the end,' Milo agreed despondently. 'There's no hope left. And all because I left them free to make their own decisions. That should teach me a lesson about discipline the next time I try something like this.'
'Why don't you sell your cotton to the government?' Yossarian suggested casually, as he watched the four men in streaked fatigues shoveling heaping bladefuls of the copperred earth back down inside the grave.
Milo vetoed the idea brusquely. 'It's a matter of principle,' he explained firmly. 'The government has no business in business, and I would be the last person in the world to ever try to involve the government in a business of mine. But the business of government is business,' he remembered alertly, and continued with elation. 'Calvin Coolidge said that, and Calvin Coolidge was a President, so it must be true. And the government does have the responsibility of buying all the Egyptian cotton I've got that no one else wants so that I can make a profit, doesn't it?' Milo's face clouded almost as abruptly, and his spirits descended into a state of sad anxiety. 'But how will I get the government to do it?'
'Bribe it,' Yossarian said.
'Bribe it!' Milo was outraged and almost lost his balance and broke his neck again. 'Shame on you!' he scolded severely, breathing virtuous fire down and upward into his rusty mustache through his billowing nostrils and prim lips. 'Bribery is against the law, and you know it. But it's not against the law to make a profit, is it? So it can't be against the law for me to bribe someone in order to make a fair profit, can it? No, of course not!' He fell to brooding again, with a meek, almost pitiable distress. 'But how will I know who to bribe?'
'Oh, don't you worry about that,' Yossarian comforted him with a toneless snicker as the engines of the jeeps and ambulance fractured the drowsy silence and the vehicles in the rear began driving away backward. 'You make the bribe big enough and they'll find you. Just make sure you do everything right out in the open. Let everyone know exactly what you want and how much you're willing to pay for it. The first time you act guilty or ashamed, you might get into trouble.'
'I wish you'd come with me,' Milo remarked. 'I won't feel safe among people who take bribes. They're no better than a bunch of crooks.'
'You'll be all right,' Yossarian assured him with confidence. 'If you run into trouble, just tell everybody that the security of the country requires a strong domestic Egyptian-cotton speculating industry.'
'It does,' Milo informed him solemnly. 'A strong Egyptian-cotton speculating industry means a much stronger America.'
'Of course it does. And if that doesn't work, point out the great number of American families that depend on it for income.'
'A great many American families do depend on it for income.'
'You see?' said Yossarian. 'You're much better at it than I am. You almost make it sound true.'
'It is true,' Milo exclaimed with a strong trace of old hauteur.
'That's what I mean. You do it with just the right amount of conviction.'
'You're sure you won't come with me?' Yossarian shook his head.
Milo was impatient to get started. He stuffed the remainder of the chocolate-covered cotton ball into his shirt pocket and edged his way back gingerly along the branch to the smooth gray trunk. He threw this arms about the trunk in a generous and awkward embrace and began shinnying down, the sides of his leather-soled shoes slipping constantly so that it seemed many times he would fall and injure himself. Halfway down, he changed his mind and climbed back up. Bits of tree bark stuck to his mustache, and his straining face was flushed with exertion.
'I wish you'd put your uniform on instead of going around naked that way,' he confided pensively before he climbed back down again and hurried away. 'You might start a trend, and then I'll never get rid of all this goldarned cotton.'
Catch-22
The Chaplain
It was already some time since the chaplain had first begun wondering what everything was all about. Was there a God? How could he be sure? Being an Anabaptist minister in the American Army was difficult enough under the best of circumstances; without dogma, it was almost intolerable.
People with loud voices frightened him. Brave, aggressive men of action like Colonel Cathcart left him feeling helpless and alone. Wherever he went in the Army, he was a stranger. Enlisted men and officers did not conduct themselves with him as they conducted themselves with other enlisted men and officers, and even other chaplains were not as friendly toward him as they were toward each other. In a world in which success was the only virtue, he had resigned himself to failure. He was painfully aware that he lacked the ecclesiastical aplomb and savoir-faire that enabled so many of his colleagues in other faiths and sects to get ahead. He was just not equipped to excel. He thought of himself as ugly and wanted daily to be home with his wife.
Actually, the chaplain was almost good-looking, with a pleasant, sensitive face as pale and brittle as sandstone. His mind was open on every subject.
Perhaps he really was Washington Irving, and perhaps he really had been signing Washington Irving's name to those letters he knew nothing about. Such lapses of memory were not uncommon in medical annals, he knew. There was no way of really knowing anything. He remembered very distinctly--or was under the impression he remembered very distinctly--his feeling that he had met Yossarian somewhere before the first time he had met Yossarian lying in bed in the hospital. He remembered experiencing the same disquieting sensation almost two weeks later when Yossarian appeared at his tent to ask to be taken off combat duty. By that time, of course, the chaplain had met Yossarian somewhere before, in that odd, unorthodox ward in which every patient seemed delinquent but the unfortunate patient covered from head to toe in white bandages and plaster who was found dead one day with a thermometer in his mouth. But the chaplain's impression of a prior meeting was of some occasion far more momentous and occult than that, of a significant encounter with Yossarian in some remote, submerged and perhaps even entirely spiritual epoch in which he had made the identical, foredooming admission that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to help him.
Doubts of such kind gnawed at the chaplain's lean, suffering frame insatiably. Was there a single true faith, or a life after death? How many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and with what matters did God occup