Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

"The reports all agree," said the thin, mean-looking, swarthy one with a sharp, crooked nose, manic eyes that seemed ignited by hilarity, small, irregular teeth stained brown with nicotine, and almost no lips.

"Chaplain," said the chubby one, who smiled and winked a lot with no hint of merriment and always smelled sourly of beer. "About radiation. Have you been, before we brought you here--and we want the truth, buddy boy, we'd rather have nothing if we can't have the truth, got that?--had you been absorbing radiation illegally?"

"How would I know, sir? What is illegal radiation?"

"Radiation that you don't know about and we do."

"As opposed to what?"

"Radiation that you don't know about and we do."

"I'm confused. I don't hear a difference."

"It's implied, in the way we say it."

"And you missed it. Add that one to the list."

"You got him on that one. By the balls, I'd say."

"That's enough, Ace. We'll continue tomorrow."

"Sure, General."

There was palpable insolence in the manner in which Ace spoke to the general, and the chaplain was embarrassed.

The officer in overall charge of the Wisconsin Project was General Leslie R. Groves, of the earlier Manhattan Project, which had developed the first atom bombs in 1945, and he gave every indication of being genuinely solicitous, warmhearted, and shielding. By now the chaplain was comfortable with him. He had learned much from General Groves about the rationale warranting his despotic incarceration and ceaseless surveillance, as well as the differences between fission and fusion and the three states of hydrogen with which he appeared to be meddling, or which were meddling with him. After hydrogen 1, there was deuterium, with an extra neutron in each atom, which combined with oxygen to form heavy water. And then came tritium, the radioactive gas with two extra neutrons, which was used as paint in self-illuminating gauges and clock faces, including those of the new line of novelty pornographic bedroom clocks that overnight had captured the lustful fancy of the nation, and to boost the detonating process in thermonuclear devices like hydrogen bombs containing lithium deuteride, a deuterium compound. The earliest of these bombs, set off in 1952, had produced a destructive force one thousand times greater--one thousand times greater, emphasized General Groves--than the bombs dropped on Japan. And where did that deuterium come from? Heavy water.

And he'd been flushing his away.

"What have you been doing with mine?"

"Sending it out to be turned into tritium," answered General Groves.

"See what you've been pissing away, Chaplain?"

"That will do now, Ace."

With General Groves at his side, the chaplain had stepped down once from his pullman apartment onto a small playground with squares of white concrete in back of a blank-faced pebblestone building with a cross on top that looked like an ancient Italian church. There was a basketball hoop and backboard raised on a wooden beam whose dark varnish looked recent and the pattern of a shuffleboard court on the ground in paint of flat green. A soccer ball in black and white stitched sections that gave it the look of a large molecular model primed to explode lay in the center as though waiting to be kicked. In a corner was a sun-browned vendor at a souvenir stand featuring picture postcards, newspapers, and sailors' hats of ocean blue with white piping and white letters spelling the word VENEZIA, and the chaplain wondered aloud if they really were in Venice. The general said they were not but that it made a nice change to think so. Despite the illusion of sky and fresh air, they were still indoors, underground. The chaplain did not want to play basketball or shuffleboard or to kick the soccer ball and wanted no souvenirs. The two walked around the railroad car for forty minutes, with General Groves setting a fairly energetic pace.

Another time, after they had dismounted near a small underpass going off on a course perpendicular to their tracks, he heard dim, tiny gunpowder reports, like those of small firecrackers, sounding somewhere from a hollow distance inside. It was a shooting gallery. The chaplain did not choose to try his luck and perhaps win a stuffed teddy bear. He did not want to pitch pennies on the chance of winning a coconut. He heard also from inside that space the music of a carousel and then the alternating roaring rise and fall of the squealing steel wheels and wrenching cars of a roller-coaster in motion. No, the chaplain had never been to Coney Island or heard of George C. Tilyou's Steeplechase Amusement Park, and he had no wish to go there now. He had no desire either to meet Mr. Tilyou himself or to visit his resplendent carousel.

General Groves shrugged. "You seem sunk in apathy," he offered with some pity. "Nothing seems to interest you, not television comedy, news, or sports events."

"I know."

"Me neither," said the psychiatrist.

It was

on the third trip back to his home in Kenosha that the first of the food packages from Milo Minderbinder was delivered to him. After that these parcels came every week on the same day. The gift card never changed:

WHAT'S GOOD FOR MILO MINDERBINDER IS GOOD FOR THE COUNTRY.

The contents did not alter either. Neatly placed in a bed of excelsior were a new Zippo cigarette lighter, a packet of sterile swabs on sticks of pure Egyptian cotton, a fancy candy box containing one pound of M & M's premium chocolate-covered Egyptian cotton candy, a dozen eggs from Malta, a bottle of Scotch whisky from a distiller in Sicily, all made in Japan, and souvenir quantities of pork from York, ham from Siam, and tangerines from New Orleans, which also originated in the Orient. The chaplain gave consent when General Groves suggested he donate the package to people above who still had nowhere to live. The chaplain was surprised the first time.

"Are there homeless in Kenosha now?"

"We are not in Kenosha now," answered General Groves, and moved to the window to press the location button.