Closing Time (8 page)

"Who," asked Yossarian austerely, "the fuck are you?"

The reply was instantaneous. "Chaplain, Tappman, Chaplain Tappman, Albert Tappman, Chaplain?" chattered Chaplain Albert Tappman garrulously. "Pianosa? Air force? World War II?"

Yossarian at last allowed himself a beam of recognition. "Well, I'll be damned!" He spoke with some warmth when he at last appreciated that he was again with the army chaplain Albert T. Tappman after more than forty-five years. "Come on in. You look good too," he offered generously to this man who looked peaked, undernourished, harried, and old. "Sit down, for God sakes."

The chaplain sat down submissively. "But, Yossarian. I'm sorry to find you in a hospital. Are you very sick?"

"I'm not sick at all."

"That's good then, isn't it?"

"Yes, that is good. And how are you?"

And all at once the chaplain looked distraught. "Not good, I'm beginning to think, no, maybe not so good."

"That's bad then," said Yossarian, glad that the time to come directly to the point was so soon at hand. "Well, then, tell me, Chaplain, what brings you here? If it's another old air corps reunion, you have come to the wrong man."

"It's not a reunion." The chaplain looked miserable.

"What then?"

"Trouble," he said simply. "I think it may be serious. I don't understand it."

He had been to a psychiatrist, of course, who'd told him he was a very good candidate for late-life depression and already too old to expect any better kind.

"I've got that too."

It was possible, it had been suggested, that the chaplain was imagining it all. The chaplain did not imagine, he imagined, that he was imagining any of it.

But this much was certain.

When none in the continuing stream of intimidating newcomers materializing in Kenosha on official missions to question him about his problem seemed inclined to help him even understand what the problem was, he'd remembered Yossarian and thought of the Freedom of Information Act.

The Freedom of Information Act, the chaplain explained, was a federal regulation obliging government agencies to release all information they had to anyone who made application for it, except information they had that they did not want to release.

And because of this one catch in the Freedom of Information Act, Yossarian had subsequently found out, they were technically not compelled to release any information at all. Hundreds of thousands of pages each week went out regularly to applicants with everything blacked out on them but punctuation marks, prepositions, and conjunctions. It was a good catch, Yossarian judged expertly, because the government did not have to release any information about the information they chose not to release, and it was impossible to know if anyone was complying with the liberalizing federal law called the Freedom of Information Act.

The chaplain was back in Wisconsin no more than one day or two when the detachment of sturdy secret agents descended upon him without notice to spirit him away. They were there, they said, on a matter of such sensitivity and national importance that they could not even say who they were without compromising the secrecy of the agency for which they said they worked. They had no arrest warrant. The law said they did not need one. What law? The same law that said they never had to cite it.

"That's peculiar, isn't it?" mused Yossarian.

"Is it?" said the chaplain's wife with surprise, when they conversed on the telephone. "Why?"

"Please go on."

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?"

"I'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 setting 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?"

"About one thirtieth of an ounce. But that's not the point."

"Thirty thousand dollars for one thirtieth of an ounce? That sounds almost as good as drugs." Milo spoke with his disunited eyes fixed on a distance speculatively, each brown iris pointing off in a different direction, as though, in concert, they took in to the horizon the entirety of all that was visible to humankind. The halves of his mustache were palpitating in separate cadences, the individual rusty-gray hairs oscillating skittishly like sensors taking notes electronically. "Is there much of a demand for heavy water?" he inquired.

"Every country wants it. But that's not the point."

"What's it used for?"

"Nuclear energy, mainly. And making atomic warheads."

"That sounds better than drugs," Milo went on in fascination. "Would you say that heavy water is as good a growth industry as illegal drugs?"

"I would not call heavy water a growth industry," Yossarian answered wryly. "But this is not what I'm talking about. Milo, I want to find out where he is."

"Where who is?"

"Tappman. The one I'm talking to you about. He was the chaplain in the army with us."

"I was in the army with a lot of people."

"He gave you a character reference when you nearly got in trouble for bombing our own air base."

"I get a lot of character references. Heavy water? Yes? That's what it's called? What is heavy water?"

"It's heavy water."

"Yes, I see. And what is the gas?"

"Tritium. But that's not the point."

"Who makes heavy water?"

"Chaplain Tappman does, for one. Milo, I want to find him and get him back before anything happens to him."

"And I want to help," promised Milo, "before Harold Strange-love, General Electric, or one of my other competitors does. I can't thank you enough for coming to me with this, Yossarian. You're worth your weight in gold. Tell me, which is worth more, gold or tritium?"

"Tritium."

"Then you're worth your weight in tritium. I'm busy today, but I must find that chaplain and sneak a man inside with the scientists interrogating him to establish ownership."

"How will you manage that?"

"I'll simply say it's in the national interest."

"How will you prove it?"

"By saying it twice," answered Milo, and flew off to Washington for his second presentation of the new secret bomber he had in mind that made no noise and could not be seen.

6

Milo

"You can't hear it and you can't see it. It will go faster than sound and slower than sound."

"Is that why you say your plane is sub-supersonic?"

"Yes, Major Bowes."

"When would you want it to go slower than sound?"

"When it's landing, and perhaps when it's taking off."

"Absolutely, Mr. Wintergreen?"

"Positively, Captain Hook."

"Thank you, Mr. Minderbinder."

They were meeting one level belowground in the basement of MASSPOB, the new Military Affairs Special Secret Projects Office Building, in a circular chamber with Lucite walls of ocean blue illuminated with bowed lines of longitude over warped continents and vivid free-form sculptured panels of fighting fish at war with swooping birds of prey. On the wall behind the barbered heads of the curving row of questioners was a condor with colossal wings and rapacious golden talons. All present were male. No transcript was authorized. These were men of keen intellect and their collective memory was reference enough. Two were already stifling yawns. All took for granted that the room was bugged anyway. Proceedings of such a sort were too secret to remain confidential.

"Will it go faster than light?" inquired a colonel in the half circle of experts flanking the presiding figure in dead center, who sat on a chair higher than the rest.

"It will go almost as fast."

"We can rev it up to go even faster than light."

"There would be some increase in fuel consumption."

"Wait a minute, please wait just one minute, Mr. Minderbinder, let me ask something," slowly cut in a puzzled civilian with a professorial demeanor. "Why would your bomber be noiseless? We have supersonic planes now, and they surely make noise with their sonic booms, don't they?"

"It would be noiseless to the crew."

"Why should that be important to the enemy?"

"It could be important to the crew," emphasized Milo, "and no one is more concerned about those kids than we are. Some of them may be aloft for months."

"Maybe years, with the refueling planes we recommend."

"Will they be invisible too?'

"If you want them to be."

"And make no noise?"

"The crew won't hear them."

"Unless they slow down and allow the noise to catch up."

"I see, Mr. Wintergreen. It's all very clever."

"Thank you, Colonel Pickering."

"How large is your crew?"

"Just two. Two are cheaper to train than four."

"Absolutely, Mr. Minderbinder?"

"Positively, Colonel North."

The officer in the center was a general, and he cleared his throat now as a proclamation of intent. The room fell still. He treasured the suspense.

"Does light move?" he demanded finally.

A leaden silence ensued.

"Light moves, General Bingam," Milo Minderbinder sprang in finally, with relief that he could.

"Faster than anything," ex-PFC Wintergreen added helpfully. "Light is just about the fastest thing there is."

"And one of the brightest too."

Bingam turned dubiously to the men on his left. A few of them nodded. He frowned.

"Are you sure?" he asked, and swiveled his sober mien to the specialists on his right.

A few of these nodded fearfully too. Some glanced away.

"That's funny," Bingam said slowly. "I see that light standing on the corner table and it looks perfectly still."