They read him his rights and said he did not have them. Did he want to make trouble? No, he did not want to make trouble. Then he would have to shut his mouth and go along with them. They had no search warrant either but proceeded to search the house anyway. They and others like them had been back several times since, with crews of technicians with badges and laboratory coats, gloves, Geiger counters, and surgical masks, who took samples of soil, paint, wood, water, and just about everything else in beakers and test tubes and other special containers. They dug up the ground. The neighborhood wondered.
The chaplain's problem was heavy water.
He was passing it.
"I'm afraid it's true," Leon Shumacher had confided to Yossarian, when he had the full urinalysis report. "Where did you get that specimen?"
"From that friend who was here last week when you dropped by. My old chaplain from the army."
"Where did he get it?"
"From his bladder, I guess. Why?"
"Are you sure?"
"How sure can I be?" said Yossarian. "I didn't watch him. Where the hell else would he get it?"
"Grenoble, France. Georgia, Tennessee, or South Carolina, I think. That's where most of it is made."
"Most of what?"
"Heavy water."
"What the hell does all of this mean, Leon?" Yossarian wanted to know. "Are they absolutely sure? There's no mistake?"
"Not from what I'm reading here. They could tell it was heavy almost immediately. It took two people to lift the eyedropper. Of course they're sure. There's an extra neutron in each hydrogen molecule of water. Do you know how many molecules there are in just a few ounces? That friend of yours must weigh fifty pounds more than he looks."
"Listen, Leon," Yossarian said, in a voice lowered warily. "You'll keep this secret, won't you?"
"Of course we will. This is a hospital. We'll tell no one but the federal government."
"The government? They're the ones who've been bothering him! They're the ones he's most afraid of!"
"They have to, John," Leon Shumacher intoned in an automatic bedside manner. "The lab sent it to radiology to make sure it's safe, and radiology had to notify the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy. John, there's not a country in the world that allows heavy water without a license, and this guy is producing it by the quart several times a day. This deuterium oxide is dynamite, John."
"Is it dangerous?"
"Medically? Who knows? I tell you I never heard of anything like this before. But he ought to find out. He might be turning into a nuclear power plant or an atom bomb. You ought to alert him immediately."
By the time Yossarian did telephone Chaplain Albert T. Tappman, USAF, retired, to warn him, there was only Mrs. Tappman at home, in hysteria and in tears. The chaplain had been disappeared only hours before.
She had not heard from him since, although punctually each week Mrs. Karen Tappman was visited and assured he was well and given cash approximating on the generous side the amount he would have brought in were he still at liberty. The agents glowed with elation upon being told, tearfully, she had not heard from him. It was the confirmation they wanted that he was not getting through to anyone outside.
"I'll keep trying to track him down for you, Mrs. Tappman," Yossarian promised each time they spoke. "Although I don't really know where to turn next."
The lawyers she'd consulted did not believe her. The police in Kenosha were skeptical too. Her children also were dubious, although they could give no currency to the police theory that the chaplain, like many a missing man in their missing-persons book, had run off with another woman.
All that John Yossarian had been able to find out since was that whatever significance the chaplain had for his official captors was only monetary, military, scientific, industrial, diplomatic, and international.
He found this out from Milo.
He went first to good friends in Washington with influence--a lawyer, a fund-raiser, a newspaper columnist, and an image maker--who all said they did not want to go near it and thereafter did not
return his calls or want him for a friend anymore. A lobbyist and a public relations counselor both requested large fees and guaranteed they could not guarantee they would do anything to earn them. His senator was useless, his governor helpless. The American Civil Liberties Union backed off too from the Case of the Missing Chaplain: they agreed with the police in Kenosha that he probably had run off with another woman. At last, in frustration, he went to Milo Minderbinder, who chewed his upper and then his lower lip and said: "Heavy water? How much is heavy water selling for?"
"It fluctuates, Milo. A lot. I've looked it up. There's a gas that comes from it that costs even more. About thirty thousand dollars a gram right now, I'd guess. But that's not the point."
"How much is a gram?"