Each time Chaplain Albert Taylor Tappman was transferred to a new location, he felt himself still in the same place, and with good reason. The lead-lined living space to which he was confined was a railroad car, and neither before nor after each journey was he permitted to leave at will. His surroundings were no different.
The several laboratories, equipment cars, and medical examination rooms were also on wheels, as were, just past his kitchen, the carriages containing the offices and domiciles of the executive officers currently in charge of what by now had come to be called, in official parlance, the Wisconsin Project. His doors were locked and guarded by men in uniform bearing automatic assault weapons with short barrels and large ammunition clips. He had learned this about his train: there generally was no place to go but to another part of the train.
He was not permitted to dismount, except for infrequent invitations for restricted forms of recreation, which he now invariably declined. He was free to say no to that. He had never enjoyed exercise particularly and was not tempted now. While he sat in his leather easy chair, his muscle tone was improved through painless procedures of electrical stimulation. The advantages of vigorous aerobic exertions were as well obtained without effort from specialized machinery boosting his pulse beat and respiration and enlarging his blood flow. He was in hardier physical condition than before and, he noticed each morning when he shaved, looked better too.
Sometimes the travel from one place to another used up several days, and he quickly understood he was on a train with smoothly turning, quiet, tranquilizing wheels, a noiseless engine, and rails and a roadbed that were as close to perfection as anything conceived and engineered in this world could ever hope to come. He had all conveniences. His car was a pullman apartment with a walk-through bedroom and living room with gray wall-to-wall carpeting. He had a combination study—recreation room with a dark Mexican rug patterned in pink rose blossoms and white and yellow meadow flowers, on a knotty-pine floor bleached to a cream color with a patina of polyurethane. At the far end was a pullman kitchen with enough space for a table and two chairs, and there he took his meals and supplementary nourishment, always scrutinized intently as he chewed and swallowed by at least one sullen observer in a white laboratory coat, always making notes. He knew of nothing that was kept hidden from him. Everything he ate and drank was measured, sampled, analyzed, and inspected beforehand for radiation and mineral content. Somewhere nearby, he’d been informed, perhaps in another railroad car for the convenience of proximity, was at least one control group comprising individuals who consumed just what he did at the very same time, in the same portions and combinations, who did exactly as he did from morning to night. As yet there were no signs of an abnormality like his own. There were built-in Geiger counters in all his rooms, for his protection too, and these were tested twice daily. All the people who came near him—the chemists, physicists, medical doctors, technicians, and military officials, even the guards with their guns and the waiters who served him and cleared his table and the women who showed up to clean and help cook—wore name tags of mother-of-pearl and badges to register the stigmata of radioactivity immediately. He was still safe. They gave him everything he could ask for except the freedom to go home.
“Although?”
Although life at home, he admitted, had ceased being as pleasing as in the past, and he and his wife, overfull with television dramas, newscasts, and situation comedies, had speculated often about ways to bring back into the untroubled lives of their long marriage a greater amount of voluntary activities and pleasurable surprises. Trips abroad with tour groups had lost their flavor. They had fewer friends than before, a scarcity of energy and motivation, and their excitements and diversions resided almost wholly now in watching television and in contacts with their children and grandchildren, all of whom—they gave thanks daily for this—continued to reside in easy traveling distance of their home in Kenosha.
The malady of mind he outlined was not uncommon among Americans of his generation, said the understanding psychiatrist in uniform sent every other day to do what he could to ameliorate the stress of the chaplain’s imprisonment and at the same time, as he admitted, pry out any knowledge germane to his remarkable condition that he was not yet consciously willing to bare.
“And at age seventy-two, Chaplain, you are probably a very likely candidate for what we label late-life depression,” said the qualified medical man. “Shall I tell you what I mean?”
“I’ve been told that before,” said the chaplain.
“I’m half your age, and I’m a good candidate too, if that brings you any solace.”
He missed his wife, he confided, and knew that she missed him. She was well, he was assured at least three times weekly. They were not permitted to communicate directly, not even in writing. The youngest of his three children, a mere toddler when he was overseas, was now near fifty. The children were fine, the grandchildren too.
Nevertheless, the chaplain worried about all in his family inordinately (“Pathologically?” guessed the psychiatrist discreetly. “But of course, that would be normal too”) and reverted in torment obsessively to other dreads he sensed were imminent yet could not name.
That was normal too.
In spite of himself, he regressed habitually to the same insistent fantasies of disaster with which he had tortured himself in the past in the desolating shock of loneliness and loss attending his first separation from his wife and children, during his tour of duty in the army.
There were accidents again to worry about and diseases like Ewing’s tumor, leukemia, Hodgkin’s disease, and other cancers. He saw himself young again on Pianosa and he saw his smallest son, an infant again, die two or three times every week because his wife still had not been taught how to stop arterial bleeding; watched again in tearful, paralyzed silence his whole family electrocuted, one after the other, at a baseboard socket because he had never told her that a human body would conduct electricity; all four still went up in flames almost every night when the water heater exploded and set the two-story wooden house afire; in ghastly, heartless, revolting detail he saw his poor wife’s trim and fragile younger body again crushed to a viscous pulp against the brick wall of a market building by a half-witted drunken automobile driver and watched his hysterical daughter, now again about five, six, seven, ten, or eleven, being led away from the grisly scene by a kindly middle-aged gentleman with snow-white hair who raped and murdered her time and time again as soon as he had driven her off to a deserted sandpit, while his two younger children starved to death slowly in the house after his wife’s mother, who had been baby-sitting then and had long since passed away peacefully in old age from natural causes, dropped dead from a heart attack when news of his dear wife’s accident was given her over the telephone.
His memories of these illusions were merciless. Nostalgic and abject, he regressed repetitiously and helplessly with a certain disappointed yearning to these earlier times of young fatherhood nearly half a century back, when he was never without misery, and never without hope.
“That’s another commonplace feature of late-life depression,” advised the psychiatrist, with tender appreciation. “When you get older, you might find yourself regressing to times when you were even younger. I do that already.”
He wondered where his memory would end. He did not want to speak about his extraordinary vision, perhaps a miracle, of that naked man in a tree, just outside the military cemetery in Pianosa at the sad burial of a young boy named Snowden, who’d been killed in his airplane on a mission bombing bridges over Avignon in southern France. Standing at the open grave with Major Danby to the left of him and Major Major to the right, across the gaping hole in the red earth from a short enlisted man named Samuel Singer, who had been on the mission in the same plane with the deceased, he could recall again with mortifying clarity how he had faltered with a shiver in his eulogy when he lifted his eyes toward the heavens and they fell instead on the figure in the tree, halted in midsentence as though stricken speechless for the moment with all breath sucked out of him. The possibility that there really had been a naked man in a tree had still never entered his mind. He kept this memory to himself. He would not want the sensitive psychiatrist with whom he was on fine terms to conclude he was crazy.
No sign of similar divine immanence had been granted him since, although he begged for one now. Secretly, in shame, he prayed. He was not ashamed that he prayed but ashamed that someone should find out he prayed and challenge him about it. He prayed also for Yossarian to come swooping into the scene like a superman in another miracle—he could think of no one else to wish for—and set him free from the unfathomable crisis in which he was now helplessly enmeshed, so that he could go back home. Always in his lifetime he had wanted only to be home.
It was not his fault that he was passing heavy water.
At various times when not in transit he was led down the few steps from his carriage to walk briskly around it for twenty, thirty, then forty minutes, observed by armed guards positioned some distance away. Always someone paced alongside—a medical specialist, a scientist, an intelligence agent, an officer, or the general himself—and periodically there was a medical cuff on his arm to record his pressure and his pulse, and a mask with a canister covering his nose and his mouth in which his exhalations were recovered. From these sessions of exercise and exertion he perceived that he was underground at least much of the time.
Indoors in his quarters he could approach any of the windows on either side in all his rooms and see Paris, if he chose, Montmartre from the prominent rampart of the Arc de Triomphe, or a view from Montmartre enveloping the Louvre, the same triumphal arch, the Eiffel Tower, and the serpentine Seine. The receding spectacle of the rooftops was monumental too. Or he could look out a window and see, if he preferred, the Spanish city of Toledo from a choice of perspectives, the university city of Salamanca, the Alhambra, or move to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, or Saint Catherine’s College at Oxford University. The controls on the consoles at each of the windows were simple to master. Each window was a video screen offering a virtually unlimited selection of locations.
In New York the default perspective was from a picture window on an upper floor of a high-rise apartment building. He could move about the city as expeditiously as he could move about the world. Across the avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal one day soon after he was taken into custody he was so positive he saw Yossarian dismounting from a taxicab that he nearly cried out his name. In Washington, D.C., he was enabled to pass indoors and window-shop in leisure in the lobby of MASSPOB and at any of the fabulous displays on the retail mezzanines. In all of his places the lighting and various colorations altered with the hours to match his own time of day. His favorite views in darkness were of the casinos in Las Vegas and of the city of Los Angeles at night from the Sunset Strip. He was free to look outside at almost any place he wanted from his windows except at what really was there. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, he had the sight of his city from the covered veranda at the front of his house and the equally reassuring picture at the back from the small patio bordering his small garden, where he was wont to sit with his wife on the swing at dusk on temperate moonlit nights and, while watching fireflies, wonder together in tristful reminiscence where all the time had gone, how fast the century had passed. His green thumb had lost its expert touch. He still loved weeding but tired quickly and was frequently discouraged by the aches in his legs and lower back from what his doctor called lumbago. Looking out the window of his train from the front of his house one time, he saw a neighbor across the street he was certain had passed away a few years before, and he was momentarily disoriented. He was stunned to think that beneath the surface of his familiar city, in which he had spent nearly his whole life, there might be this hidden, subterranean railway on which he was now an unwilling passenger.
By this time, everything and, though most did not know it, everyone in a broad vicinity surrounding the chaplain’s home in Kenosha had been looked at, inspected, examined, and investigated by the most discerning and discriminating of advanced instruments and techniques: the food, the drinking water from wells and the reservoir, the air they breathed, the sewage, the garbage. Every flush of a toilet was logged for analysis, and every disposal by a home garbage disposal unit. There was no evidence yet of a contamination related however remotely to the one of which he himself was still uniquely the possessor. Nowhere in Kenosha was a molecule to be found of deuterium oxide, or, in plainer language, heavy water.
“It began as a urinary problem,” Chaplain Albert Taylor Tappman repeated still one more time.
“I’ve had those too,” revealed the psychiatrist, and emitted a sigh. “But not, of course, like yours. If I had, I suppose I would be in quarantine here with you. You really don’t know how you do it, or what you did to start it?”
The chaplain said so again with an apologetic stammer. He sat with his soft fists resting on his thighs, and this doctor seemed to believe him. His doctor at home had sensed something not normal right away and had taken a second specimen.
“I don’t know, Albert. It still feels funny to me, sort of heavy.”
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think you’re allowed to do what you’re doing without a government license. Let’s see what the laboratory says. They might have to report it.”
In no time at all the government agents moved into his house and swarmed all through it; then came the chemists, the physicists, the radiologists and urologists, the endocrinologists and gastroenterologists. In short order he was plumbed medically by every conceivable kind of specialist and environmentalist in a determined and comprehensive effort to find out where that extra hydrogen neutron was coming from in every molecule of water he passed. It was not in his perspiration. That was clean, as were the fluids everywhere else inside him.
Then came the interrogations, mannerly at first, then abusive and filled with connotations of brutality. Had he been drinking liquid hydrogen? Not to his knowledge. Oh, he would know it if he had been. He’d be dead.
“Then why are you asking me?”
It was a trick question, they crowed, cackling. They all smoked cigarettes and their hands were yellow. Liquid oxygen? He wouldn’t even know where to get it.
He would have to know in order to drink it.
He didn’t even know what it was.
Then how could he be sure he had not been drinking it?
They put that one down for the record too. It was another trick question.
“And you fell for it, Chaplain. That was good, Ace. Right, Butch?”
“You said it, Slugger.”
There were three, and they insisted on knowing whether he had friends, wives, or children in any of the countries formerly behind the iron curtain or had any now in the CIA.
“I don’t have any in the CIA either,” said the psychiatrist. “I don’t know how I’d defend myself if I did.”
Right off, they had confiscated his passport and tapped his telephone. His mail was intercepted, his bank accounts were frozen. His safe-deposit box was padlocked. Worst of all, they had taken away his Social Security number.
“No checks?” exclaimed the psychiatrist in horror.
The checks were continuing, but the Social Security number was gone. Without it, he had no identity.
The psychiatrist went ashen and trembled. “I can guess how you must feel,” he commiserated. “I couldn’t live without mine. And you really can’t tell them how you do it?”
The chemical physicists and physical chemists ruled out an insect bite. The entomologists agreed.
At the beginning, people on the whole tended to be kind and patronizing and to handle him considerately. The medical men approached him amiably as both a curiosity and opportunity. In short order, however, the sociability of all but the psychiatrist and the general grew strained and thinner. Accumulating frustration shortened tolerance. Tempers turned raw and the consultations turned adversarial. This was especially true with the intelligence agents. They were not from the FBI and not from the CIA but from someplace deeper under cover. His inability to illuminate insulted, and he was censured for an obstinate refusal to yield explanations that he did not possess.
“You are being willful,” said the biggest of the bullying interrogators.
“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.
They were in New York again, looking out past the bootblacks and the sidewalk carts of the food vendors with their smoking charcoal fires lining the streets near the front entrance to the bus terminal, looking past the PABT building to the two barren architectural towers of the World Trade Center, still possibly the tallest commercial structures in the universe.
Another time, while certain he was in MASSPOB in Washington, the chaplain saw by default mode that he was inside PABT, parked somewhere below while they switched engines and laboratory cars. He was able to gaze out through his window even into the Operations Control Center of the terminal and tie into any of the video screens there, to watch the buses arrive and depart, the diurnal tides of people, the undercover policemen who dressed like drug dealers and drug dealers who dressed like undercover policemen, the prostitutes, addicts, and runaways, the sordid, torpid couplings and other squalid acts of community life in the emergency stairwells, and even to peek inside the different washrooms to see humans peeing and doing laundry and, if he wanted to, inside the toilet cubicles themselves to observe the narcotic injections, oral sex, and defecations. He did not want to. He had television sets that could bring in programs with excellent reception on three hundred and twenty-two channels, but he found it was not fun to watch anything without his wife watching with him. Television was not much fun when they were together either, but they could at least fix their faces on the common point of the set while they fished around for something new to talk about that might lighten the lethargy. This was old age. He was still merely just past seventy-two.
Another time in New York he looked through his window at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at an hour when a meeting of ACACAMMA was disbanding, and he was certain again that he saw Yossarian leaving in the company of an elderly woman in fashionable dress and a man taller than both, and he wanted to cry out again, for this time he observed a man with red hair and a green rucksack eyeing the three craftily and falling in behind them, and then two other men, with brighter orange hair, following also, and behind them came still another man, who unmistakably was following them all. He distrusted his eyes. He felt he must be seeing things again, like that time of the vision of the man in the tree.
“And what is that other noise I continue to hear?” the chaplain finally inquired of General Groves, when they were rolling again and moving out of the city.
“You mean of water? That stream or river?”
“I hear it often. Maybe all the time.”
“I can’t say.”
“You don’t know?”
“My orders are to tell you everything I do know. That one is out of my jurisdiction. It’s more secret and lower down. We know from our sonar that it’s a fairly narrow, slow-moving body of water and that small boats without power, maybe rowboats, come by on it regularly, moving always in one direction. There’s music too. The pieces have been identified as the prelude and wedding march from the third act of the opera Lohengrin.” And faintly underlying that music, from someplace deeper, was an unrelated children’s chorus of anguish that the government musicologists had not yet been able to identify. Germany was consulted and was in anguish also over the existence in performance of a choral piece of advanced musical complexity, perhaps genius, of which they knew nothing. “The water is on my papers as the river Rhine. That’s all I know.”
“The Rhine River?” The chaplain was awed.
“No. The river Rhine. We are not in Germany now.”
They were back in the nation’s capital.
There was no good reason to doubt General Groves, who made a noticeable point of being present at all the sessions with Ace, Butch, and Slugger. The chaplain understood that even the general’s friendship might be no more than a calculated tactic in a larger strategy involving a clandestine plot with the three intelligence men, of whom he was most in fear. There was no way of knowing anything, he knew, not even that there was no way of knowing anything.
“I often feel that same way,” the general was quick to agree, when he voiced his misgivings.
“Me too,” admitted the psychiatrist.
Was the sympathizing psychiatrist also a trick?
“You’ve no right to do this to me,” the chaplain protested to General Groves when they were again alone. “I think I know that much.”
“You’re mistaken, I’m afraid,” answered the general. “I think you’ll find that we have a right to do to you anything you can’t stop us from doing. In this case, it’s both legal and regular. You were a member of the army reserves. They’ve simply called you back into service.”
“But I was discharged from the reserves,” responded the chaplain with triumph. “I have the letter to prove it.”
“I don’t think you do anymore, Chaplain. And it doesn’t show in our records.”
“Oh, yes it does,” said the chaplain, gloating. “You can find it in my Freedom of Information file. I saw it there with my own eyes.”
“Chaplain, when you look again, you’ll find it’s been blacked out. You’re not completely innocent, you know.”
“Of what am I guilty?”
“Of offenses the intelligence agents don’t know about yet. Why won’t you say that you’re guilty?”
“How can I say if they won’t tell me what they are?”
“How can they tell you if they don’t know? To begin with,” General Groves went on, in a more instructive tone, “there’s this thing with the heavy water you’re producing naturally and won’t say how.”
“I don’t know how,” protested the chaplain.
“It’s not I who don’t believe you. Then there’s this second thing, with a man named Yossarian, John Yossarian. You paid him a mysterious visit in New York as soon as we found out about this. That’s one of the reasons they picked you up.”
“There was nothing mysterious about it. I went to see him when all of this started to happen. He was in a hospital.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“Nothing. He wasn’t sick.”
“Yet in a hospital? Try to imagine, Albert, how most of this sounds. He was in that hospital at the same time a Belgian agent with throat cancer was there. That man is from Brussels, and Brussels is the center of the EEC. Is that coincidence too? He has cancer of the throat but doesn’t get better and doesn’t die. How come? In addition, there are these coded messages about him to your friend Yossarian. They go out to him four or five times a day from this woman who pretends she just likes to talk to him on the telephone. I’ve not met a woman like that. Have you? Now his kidney is failing again, she says, just yesterday. Why should his kidney be failing and not yours? You’re the one with the heavy water. I have no opinion. I don’t know any more about these things than I do about the prelude to Act III of Lohengrin or a chorus of children singing in anguish. I’m giving you the questions raised by others. There’s even a deep suspicion the Belgian is with the CIA. There’s even some belief that you’re CIA.”
“I’m not! I swear I’ve never been with the CIA!”
“I’m not the one you have to convince. These messages go out from the hospital through Yossarian’s nurse.”
“Nurse?” cried the chaplain. “Is Yossarian ill?”
“He is fit as a fiddle, Albert, and in better shape than you or I.”
“Then why does he have a nurse?”
“For carnal gratification. They have been indulging themselves in sexual congress one way or another now four or five times a week”—the general looked down punctiliously at a line graph on his lap to make absolutely sure—“in his office, in her apartment, and in his apartment, often on the floor of the kitchen with the water running or on the floor of one of the other rooms, beneath the air conditioner. Although I see on this chart that the frequency of libidinous contact is diminishing sharply. The honeymoon may be ending. He no longer sends her long-stemmed red roses often or talks as much about lingerie, according to this latest Gaffney Report.”
The chaplain was squirming beneath these accumulating personal details. “Please.”
“I’m merely trying to fill you in.” The general turned to another page. “And then there’s this secret arrangement you seem to have with Mr. Milo Minderbinder that you have not seen fit to mention.”
“Milo Minderbinder?” The chaplain’s reaction was one of incredulity. “I know him, of course. He sends these packages. I don’t know why. I was in the war with him, but I haven’t seen or spoken to him in almost fifty years.”
“Come, Chaplain, come.” Now the general feigned a look of exaggerated disappointment. “Albert, Milo Minderbinder claims ownership of you, has a patent pending on you, has registered a trademark for your brand of heavy water, with a halo, no less. He has offered you to the government in conjunction with a contract for a military airplane for which he is vying, and he receives weekly a very, very hefty payment for every pint of heavy water we extract from you. You’re amazed?”
“I’ve never heard any of this before!”
“Albert, he’d have no right to do that on his own.”
“Leslie, now I’m sure I’ve got you.” The chaplain came near to smiling. “You said just a while ago that people have a right to do whatever we can’t stop them from doing.”
“That’s true, Albert. But in practice, it’s an argument we can use and you cannot. We can go through all of this again at the weekly review tomorrow afternoon.”
At the weekly assembly conducted every Friday, it was the general himself who got wind first of the newest development.
“Who farted?” he asked.
“Yeah, what is that smell?”
“I know it,” said the chemical physicist on duty that week. “It’s tritium.”
“Tritium?”
The Geiger counters in the room were clicking. The chaplain dropped his eyes. An appalling transformation had just come to pass. There was tritium in his flatulence.
“That changes the game, Chaplain,” the general reproved him gravely. Every test and procedure would have to be repeated and new ones initiated. “And immediately check everyone in all the other groups.”
None of the people in any of the control groups were blowing anything out their asses but the usual methane and hydrogen sulfide.
“I almost hate to send this news on,” said the general with gloom. “From now on, Chaplain, no more farting around.”
“And no more pissing against the wall.”
“That will do, Ace. Does it not strike you as odd,” General Groves inquired philosophically one week later at the freewheeling brainstorming symposium, “that it should be a man of God who might be developing within himself the thermonuclear capability for the destruction of life on this planet?”
“No, of course not.”
“Why should it?”
“Are you crazy?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Who else would it be?”
“They molest altar boys, don’t they?”
“Shouldn’t the force that created the world be the one to end it?”
“It would be even odder,” concurred the general, after weighing these contemplations, “if it were anyone else.”