Joseph Heller - Closing Time

"Your fucking missiles can't do that."

"Please tell us why the fuck we would want them to."

"Well, you fucking people, in your fucking assessments, always emphasize enemy underground bunkers for their fucking political and military leaders."

"Do we fucking emphasize that?"

"Does the President play Triage?"

"You should read what you write."

"We don't like to read."

"We hate to read."

"We can't read what we write."

"We have bombs that will go down a hundred miles before they explode. Your present depth of planning is to live forty-two miles underground. We can fuse our bombs to detonate so far past forty-two that they won't damage anybody on our side or theirs. You can wage a nuclear war that causes no damage to life or property on earth. That's humane, isn't it? That's fucking humane, I'd say."

"I'd call that fucking humane."

"Let me get one fucking thing straight. Please, Skinny, let me get a word in. These fucking units are for a second strike by us?"

"They will go after surviving enemy units that have not been used in their first strike."

"Why would they not use them in their first strike?"

"How the fuck should I know?"

"You guarantee your planes will work?"

"They've been working more than two years now. We've had models flying back and forth that long. You must tell us now if you want to go ahead. Otherwise we'll take our fucking Shhhhh! somewhere else."

"You could not do that," said Fat. "Excuse me, Skinny, let me continue."

"It's my turn, Fat. That would be against the law."

Milo 's laugh was benign. "How would you know? The planes are invisible and make no noise."

"Oh, shit, I can't believe these questions," said Wintergreen. "What the fuck difference does it make if it works or not? Its chief value is to deter. By the time it goes into action it has already failed."

"I still have a question. Let me proceed, Fat."

"It's my turn, you skinny prick."

"No, it isn't, you fat fuck."

"Don't listen to that shithead," persisted Fat. "If it's invisible and noiseless, what's to stop you from selling it to the enemy anyway?"

"Our patriotism."

And after that one, Bingam called a final recess.

"Wintergreen," whispered Milo, in the pause before they concluded, "do we really have a bomb that will go down a hundred miles before exploding?"

"We'll have to look. What about the old Stealth? Do you think they'll catch on?"

"They're not really the same. The Stealth was never built. So our Shhhhh! is newer."

"I'd say so too."

There were those on the panel who wanted more time, and others like Fat and Skinny who were insisting on a comparison check with the Strangelove B-Ware. They would need Yossarian, Milo grunted dejectedly, while the three senior military officers conferred in whispers. Bingam waited tensely. Wintergreen fumed visibly. Milo advised him to stop, since no one was watching. Finally, the rear admiral looked up.

"Gentlemen." His manner of speaking was unhurried. "We are after a weapon for the new century that will render all other armaments subsidiary and inconsequential."

"You need look no further," Milo advised hopefully.

"I myself," continued the admiral, as though he had heard nothing, "am inclined to put myself in the camp of General Bingam. Bernie, that's another feather in your cap. I want to recommend your Shhhhh! But before I put myself on record, there's a question of substance." He bent closer toward them, with his elbows on the table and his chin on clasped hands. "Your plane, Mr. Minderbinder. You must tell me honestly. If deployed in sufficient numbers, can it destroy the world?"

Milo exchanged a frantic look with Wintergreen. They chose to come clean. Wintergreen lowered his eyes while Milo responded sheepishly.

"I'm afraid not, sir," confessed Milo, with a blush. "We can make it uninhabitable, but we can't destroy it."

"I can live with that!"

"Absotively, Admiral Dewey?"

"Posilutely, General Grant."

"I'm sorry I called you a skinny prick," humbly apologized the diplomat from the Department of State.

"That's okay, you fat fuck."

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.