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'Why can't they hook the two jars up to each other and eliminate the middleman?' the artillery captain with whom Yossarian had stopped playing chess inquired. 'What the hell do they need him for?'

'I wonder what he did to deserve it,' the warrant officer with malaria and a mosquito bite on his ass lamented after Nurse Cramer had read her thermometer and discovered that the soldier in white was dead.

'He went to war,' the fighter pilot with the golden mustache surmised.

'We all went to war,' Dunbar countered.

'That's what I mean,' the warrant officer with malaria continued. 'Why him? There just doesn't seem to be any logic to this system of rewards and punishment. Look what happened to me. If I had gotten syphilis or a dose of clap for my five minutes of passion on the beach instead of this damned mosquito bite, I could see justice. But malaria? Malaria? Who can explain malaria as a consequence of fornication?' The warrant officer shook his head in numb astonishment.

'What about me?' Yossarian said. 'I stepped out of my tent in Marrakech one night to get a bar of candy and caught your dose of clap when that Wac I never even saw before kissed me into the bushes. All I really wanted was a bar of candy, but who could turn it down?'

'That sounds like my dose of clap, all right,' the warrant officer agreed. 'But I've still got somebody else's malaria. Just for once I'd like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this universe.'

'I've got somebody else's three hundred thousand dollars,' the dashing young fighter captain with the golden mustache admitted. 'I've been goofing off since the day I was born. I cheated my way through prep school and college, and just about all I've been doing ever since is shacking up with pretty girls who think I'd make a good husband. I've got no ambition at all. The only thing I want to do after the war is marry some girl who's got more money than I have and shack up with lots more pretty girls. The three hundred thousand bucks was left to me before I was born by a grandfather who made a fortune selling on an international scale. I know I don't deserve it, but I'll be damned if I give it back. I wonder who it really belongs to.'

'Maybe it belongs to my father,' Dunbar conjectured. 'He spent a lifetime at hard work and never could make enough money to even send my sister and me through college. He's dead now, so you might as well keep it.'

'Now, if we can just find out who my malaria belongs to we'd be all set. It's not that I've got anything against malaria. I'd just as soon goldbrick with malaria as with anything else. It's only that I feel an injustice has been committed. Why should I have somebody else's malaria and you have my dose of clap?'

'I've got more than your dose of clap,' Yossarian told him. 'I've got to keep flying combat missions because of that dose of yours until they kill me.'

'That makes it even worse. What's the justice in that?'

'I had a friend named Clevinger two and a half weeks ago who used to see plenty of justice in it.'

'It's the highest kind of justice of all,' Clevinger had gloated, clapping his hands with a merry laugh. 'I can't help thinking of the Hippolytus of Euripides, where the early licentiousness of Theseus is probably responsible for the asceticism of the son that helps bring about the tragedy that ruins them all. If nothing else, that episode with the Wac should teach you the evil of sexual immorality.'

'It teaches me the evil of candy.'

'Can't you see that you're not exactly without blame for the predicament you're in?' Clevinger had continued with undisguised relish. 'If you hadn't been laid up in the hospital with venereal disease for ten days back there in Africa, you might have finished your twenty-five missions in time to be sent home before Colonel Nevers was killed

and Colonel Cathcart came to replace him.'

'And what about you?' Yossarian had replied. 'You never got clap in Marrakech and you're in the same predicament.'

'I don't know,' confessed Clevinger, with a trace of mock concern. 'I guess I must have done something very bad in my time.'

'Do you really believe that?' Clevinger laughed. 'No, of course not. I just like to kid you along a little.' There were too many dangers for Yossarian to keep track of. There was Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, for example, and they were all out to kill him. There was Lieutenant Scheisskopf with his fanaticism for parades and there was the bloated colonel with his big fat mustache and his fanaticism for retribution, and they wanted to kill him, too. There was Appleby, Havermeyer, Black and Korn. There was Nurse Cramer and Nurse Duckett, who he was almost certain wanted him dead, and there was the Texan and the C.I.D. man, about whom he had no doubt. There were bartenders, bricklayers and bus conductors all over the world who wanted him dead, landlords and tenants, traitors and patriots, lynchers, leeches and lackeys, and they were all out to bump him off. That was the secret Snowden had spilled to him on the mission to Avignon --they were out to get him; and Snowden had spilled it all over the back of the plane.

There were lymph glands that might do him in. There were kidneys, nerve sheaths and corpuscles. There were tumors of the brain. There was Hodgkin's disease, leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There were fertile red meadows of epithelial tissue to catch and coddle a cancer cell. There were diseases of the skin, diseases of the bone, diseases of the lung, diseases of the stomach, diseases of the heart, blood and arteries. There were diseases of the head, diseases of the neck, diseases of the chest, diseases of the intestines, diseases of the crotch. There even were diseases of the feet. There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and every one was a potential traitor and foe. There were so many diseases that it took a truly diseased mind to even think about them as often as he and Hungry Joe did.

Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about. He grew very upset whenever he misplaced some or when he could not add to his list, and he would go rushing in a cold sweat to Doc Daneeka for help.

'Give him Ewing's tumor,' Yossarian advised Doc Daneeka, who would come to Yossarian for help in handling Hungry Joe, 'and follow it up with melanoma. Hungry Joe likes lingering diseases, but he likes the fulminating ones even more.' Doc Daneeka had never heard of either. 'How do you manage to keep up on so many diseases like that?' he inquired with high professional esteem.

'I learn about them at the hospital when I study the Reader's Digest.' Yossarian had so many ailments to be afraid of that he was sometimes tempted to turn himself in to the hospital for good and spend the rest of his life stretched out there inside an oxygen tent with a battery of specialists and nurses seated at one side of his bed twenty-four hours a day waiting for something to go wrong and at least one surgeon with a knife poised at the other, ready to jump forward and begin cutting away the moment it became necessary. Aneurisms, for instance; how else could they ever defend him in time against an aneurism of the aorta? Yossarian felt much safer inside the hospital than outside the hospital, even though he loathed the surgeon and his knife as much as he had ever loathed anyone. He could start screaming inside a hospital and people would at least come running to try to help; outside the hospital they would throw him in prison if he ever started screaming about all the things he felt everyone ought to start screaming about, or they would put him in the hospital. One of the things he wanted to start screaming about was the surgeon's knife that was almost certain to be waiting for him and everyone else who lived long enough to die. He wondered often how he would ever recognize the first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze, stain, lethargy, vocal slip, loss of balance or lapse of memory that would signal the inevitable beginning of the inevitable end.

He was afraid also that Doc Daneeka would still refuse to help him when he went to him again after jumping out of Major Major's office, and he was right.

'You think you've got something to be afraid about?' Doc Daneeka demanded, lifting his delicate immaculate dark head up from his chest to gaze at Yossarian irascibly for a moment with lachrymose eyes. 'What about me? My precious medical skills are rusting away here on this lousy island while other doctors are cleaning up. Do you think I enjoy sitting here day after day refusing to help you? I wouldn't mind it so much if I could refuse to help you back in the States or in some place like Rome. But saying no to you here isn't easy for me, either.'

'Then stop saying no. Ground me.'

'I can't ground you,' Doc Daneeka mumbled. 'How many times do you have to be told?'

'Yes you can. Major Major told me you're the only one in the squadron who can ground me.' Doc Daneeka was stunned. 'Major Major told you that? When?'

'When I tackled him in the ditch.'