"Thank you, Sergeant, I think I will," said Appleby. "About how long will I have to wait? I've still got a lot to get done today so that I can be fully prepared bright and early tomorrow morning to go into combat the minute they want me to."
"Sir?"
"What's that, Sergeant?"
"What was your question?"
"About how long will I have to wait before I can go in to see the major?"
"Just until he goes out to lunch," Sergeant Towser replied. "Then you can go right in."
"But he won't be there then. Will he?"
"No, sir. Major Major won't be back in his office until after lunch."
"I see," Appleby decided uncertainly. "I think I'd better come back after lunch, then."
Appleby turned from the orderly room in secret confusion. The moment he stepped outside, he thought he saw a tall, dark officer who looked a little like Henry Fonda come jumping out of the window of the orderly-room tent and go scooting out of sight around the corner. Appleby halted and squeezed his eyes closed. An anxious doubt assailed him. He wondered if he were suffering from malaria, or, worse, from an overdose of Atabrine tablets. Appleby had been taking four times as many Atabrine tablets as the amount prescribed because he wanted to be four times as good a pilot as everyone else. His eyes were still shut when Sergeant Towser tapped him lightly on the shoulder and told him he could go in now if he wanted to, since Major Major had just gone out. Appleby's confidence returned.
"Thank you, Sergeant. Will he be back soon?"
"He'll be back right after lunch. Then you'll have to go right out and wait for him in front till he leaves for dinner. Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he's in his office."
"Sergeant, what did you just say?"
"I said that Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he's in his office."
Appleby stared at Sergeant Towser intently and attempted a firm tone. "Sergeant, are you trying to make a fool out of me just because I'm new in the squadron and you've been overseas a long time?"
"Oh, no, sir," answered the sergeant deferentially. "Those are my orders. You can ask Major Major when you see him."
"That's just what I intend to do, Sergeant. When can I see him?"
"Never."
Crimson with humiliation, Appleby wrote down his report about Yossarian and the Atabrine tablets on a pad the sergeant offered him and left quickly, wondering if perhaps Yossarian were not the only man privileged to wear an officer's uniform who was crazy.
By the time Colonel Cathcart had raised the number of missions to fifty-five, Sergeant Towser had begun to suspect that perhaps every man who wore a uniform was crazy. Sergeant Towser was lean and angular and had fine blond hair so light it was almost without color, sunken cheeks, and teeth like large white marshmallows. He ran the squadron and was not happy doing it. Men like Hungry Joe glowered at him with blameful hatred, and Appleby subjected him to vindictive discourtesy now that he had established himself as a hot pilot and a ping-pong player who never lost a point. Sergeant Towser ran the squadron because there was no one else in the squadron to run it. He had no interest in war or advancement. He was interested in shards and Hepplewhite furniture.
Almost without realizing it, Sergeant Towser had fallen into the habit of thinking of the dead man in Yossarian's tent in Yossarian's own terms -- as a dead man in Yossarian's tent. In reality, he was no such thing. He was simply a replacement pilot who had been killed in combat before he had officially reported for duty. He had stopped at the operations tent to inquire the way to the orderly-room tent and had been sent right into action because so many men had completed the thirty-five missions required then that Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren were finding it difficult to assemble the number of crews specified by Group. Because he had never officially gotten into the squadron, he could never officially be gotten out, and Sergeant Towser sensed that the multiplying communications relating to the poor man would continue reverberating forever.
His name was Mudd. To Sergeant Towser, who deplored violence and waste with equal aversion, it seemed like such an abhorrent extravagance to fly Mudd all the way across the ocean just to have him blown into bits over Orvieto less than two hours after he arrived. No one could recall who he was or what he had looked like, least of all Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren, who remembered only that a new officer had shown up at the operations tent just in time to be killed and who colored uneasily every time the matter of the dead man in Yossarian's tent was mentioned. The only one who might have seen Mudd, the men in the same plane, had all been blown to bits with him.
Yossarian, on the other hand, knew exactly who Mudd was. Mudd was the unknown soldier who had never had a chance, for that was the only thing anyone ever did know about all the unknown soldiers -- they never had a chance. They had to be dead. And this dead one was really unknown, even though his belongings still lay in a tumble on the cot in Yossarian's tent almost exactly as he had left them three months earlier the day he never arrived -- all contaminated with death less than two hours later, in the same way that all was contaminated with death in the very next week during the Great Big Siege of Bologna when the moldy odor of mortality hung wet in the air with the sulphurous fog and every man scheduled to fly was already tainted.
There was no escaping the mission to Bologna once Colonel Cathcart had volunteered his group for the ammunition dumps there that the heavy bombers on the Italian mainland had been unable to destroy from their higher altitudes. Each day's delay deepened the awareness and deepened the gloom. The clinging, overpowering conviction of death spread steadily with the continuing rainfall, soaking mordantly into each man's ailing countenance like the corrosive blot of some crawling disease. Everyone smelled of formaldehyde. There was nowhere to turn for help, not even to the medical tent, which had been ordered closed by Colonel Korn so that no one could report for sick call, as the men had done on the one clear day with a mysterious epidemic of diarrhea that had forced still another postponement. With sick call suspended and the door to the medical tent nailed shut, Doc Daneeka spent the intervals between rain perched on a high stool, wordlessly absorbing the bleak outbreak of fear with a sorrowing neutrality, roosting like a melancholy buzzard below the ominous, hand-lettered sign tacked up on the closed door of the medical tent by Captain Black as a joke and left hanging there by Doc Daneeka because it was no joke. The sign was bordered in dark crayon and read: "CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. DEATH IN THE FAMILY."
The fear flowed everywhere, into Dunbar's squadron, where Dunbar poked his head inquiringly through the entrance of the medical tent there one twilight and spoke respectfully to the blurred outline of Dr. Stubbs, who was sitting in the dense shadows inside before a bottle of whiskey and a bell jar filled with purified drinking water.
"Are you all right?" he asked solicitously.
"Terrible," Dr. Stubbs answered.
"What are you doing here?"
"Sitting."
"I thought there was no more sick call."
"There ain't."
"Then why are you sitting here?"
"Where else should I sit? At the goddam officers' club with Colonel Cathcart and Korn? Do you know what I'm doing here?"
"Sitting."
"In the squadron, I mean. Not in the tent. Don't be such a goddam wise guy. Can you figure out what a doctor is doing here in the squadron?"
"They've got the doors to the medical tents nailed shut in the other squadrons," Dunbar remarked.
"If anyone sick walks through my door I'm going to ground him," Dr. Stubbs vowed. "I don't give a damn what they say."
"You can't ground anyone," Dunbar reminded. "Don't you know the orders?"
"I'll knock him flat on his ass with an injection and really ground him." Dr. Stubbs laughed with sardonic amusement at the prospect. "They think they can order sick call out of existence. The bastards. Ooops, there it goes again." The rain began falling again, first in the trees, then in the mud puddles, then, faintly, like a soothing murmur, on the tent top. "Everything's wet," Dr. Stubbs observed with revulsion. "Even the latrines and urinals are backing up in protest. The whole goddam world smells like a charnel house."
The silence seemed bottomless when he stopped talking. Night fell. There was a sense of vast isolation.
"Turn on the light," Dunbar suggested.
"There is no light. I don't feel like starting my generator. I used to get a big kick out of saving people's lives. Now I wonder what the hell's the point, since they all have to die anyway.
"Oh, there's a point, all right," Dunbar assured him.
"Is there? What is the point?"
"The point is to keep them from dying for as long as you can."
"Yeah, but what's the point, since they all have to die anyway?"
"The trick is not to think about that."
"Never mind the trick. What the hell's the point?"
Dunbar pondered in silence for a few moments. "Who the hell knows?"
Dunbar didn't know. Bologna should have exulted Dunbar, because the minutes dawdled and the hours dragged like centuries. Instead it tortured him, because he knew he was going to be killed.
"Do you really want some more codeine?" Dr. Stubbs asked.
"It's for my friend Yossarian. He's sure he's going to be killed."
"Yossarian? Who the hell is Yossarian? What the hell kind of a name is Yossarian, anyway? Isn't he the one who got drunk and started that fight with Colonel Korn at the officers' club the other night?"
"That's right. He's Assyrian."
"That crazy bastard."
"He's not so crazy," Dunbar said. "He swears he's not going to fly to Bologna."
"That's just what I mean," Dr. Stubbs answered. "That crazy bastard may be the only sane one left."
11 CAPTAIN BLACK
Corporal Kolodny learned about it first in a phone call from Group and was so shaken by the news that he crossed the intelligence tent on tiptoe to Captain Black, who was resting drowsily with his bladed shins up on the desk, and relayed the information to him in a shocked whisper.
Captain Black brightened immediately. "Bologna?" he exclaimed with delight. "Well, I'll be damned." He broke into loud laughter. "Bologna, huh?" He laughed again and shook his head in pleasant amazement. "Oh, boy! I can't wait to see those bastards' faces when they find out they're going to Bologna. Ha, ha, ha!"
It was the first really good laugh Captain Black had enjoyed since the day Major Major outsmarted him and was appointed squadron commander, and he rose with torpid enthusiasm and stationed himself behind the front counter in order to wring the most enjoyment from the occasion when the bombardiers arrived for their map kits.
"That's right, you bastards, Bologna," he kept repeating to all the bombardiers who inquired incredulously if they were really going to Bologna. "Ha! Ha! Ha! Eat your livers, you bastards. This time you're really in for it."
Captain Black followed the last of them outside to observe with relish the effect of the knowledge upon all of the other officers and enlisted men who were assembling with their helmets, parachutes and flak suits around the four trucks idling in the center of the squadron area. He was a tall, narrow, disconsolate man who moved with a crabby listlessness. He shaved his pinched, pale face every third or fourth day, and most of the time he appeared to be growing a reddish-gold mustache over his skinny upper lip. He was not disappointed in the scene outside. There was consternation darkening every expression, and Captain Black yawned deliciously, rubbed the last lethargy from his eyes and laughed gloatingly each time he told someone else to eat his liver.
Bologna turned out to be the most rewarding event in Captain Black's life since the day Major Duluth was killed over Perugia and he was almost selected to replace him. When word of Major Duluth's death was radioed back to the field, Captain Black responded with a surge of joy. Although he had never really contemplated the possibility before, Captain Black understood at once that he was the logical man to succeed Major Duluth as squadron commander. To begin with, he was the squadron intelligence officer, which meant he was more intelligent than everyone else in the squadron. True, he was not on combat status, as Major Duluth had been and as all squadron commanders customarily were; but this was really another powerful argument in his favor, since his life was in no danger and he would be able to fill the post for as long as his country needed him. The more Captain Black thought about it, the more inevitable it seemed. It was merely a matter of dropping the right word in the right place quickly. He hurried back to his office to determine a course of action. Settling back in his swivel chair, his feet up on the desk and his eyes closed, he began imagining how beautiful everything would be once he was squadron commander.
While Captain Black was imagining, Colonel Cathcart was acting, and Captain Black was flabbergasted by the speed with which, he concluded, Major Major had outsmarted him. His great dismay at the announcement of Major Major's appointment as squadron commander was tinged with an embittered resentment he made no effort to conceal. When fellow administrative officers expressed astonishment at Colonel Cathcart's choice of Major Major, Captain Black muttered that there was something funny going on; when they speculated on the political value of Major Major's resemblance to Henry Fonda, Captain Black asserted that Major Major really was Henry Fonda; and when they remarked that Major Major was somewhat odd, Captain Black announced that he was a Communist.
