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"Thank you, Commander Whitehead. Where are you?"

"At fifty-two thousand feet, in our floating strategic command post over the geographic center of the country."

"Perfect. Instruct your units to proceed. Time is now of the essence. Then change your location."

"We have already changed our location, even as I was reporting it."

"So it's no longer accurate?"

"It was not accurate then."

"Perfect. Report all sightings of enemy missiles or aircraft. We will fill you in when you all come back."

"Good, sir. Where should we come back to?"

"Hmmmmm. There might not be a place. I don't think we thought of that. You might as well land in the territories you've destroyed. Proceed as planned."

"Absolutely, General Bingam?"

"Positively, Commander Whitehead."

"Haagen-Dazs."

"Ben & Jerry's. Dr. Strangelove?"

"That was splendid."

"Absolutely, Dr. Strangelove?"

"Positively, General Bingam. We have overlooked nothing. Now I must apologize to the rest of you, for there was one little thing we did forget." He continued with an intentional slurring of words in what was obviously a self-effacing and jocund apology. "We neglected to bring down any women. Oh, yes--I can picture all of you macho men clutching your heads and moaning with pretended unhappiness. But think of the dissension they would be causing here right now. It is not for me to recommend officially, but I am reminded by our chief of medicine here that abstinence has always proved a perfect replacement for the fairer sex. Other adequate substitutes for women are masturbation, fellatio, and sodomy. We recommend condoms, and you will find huge supplies at your drugstores and supermarkets. To maintain population, we may eventually have to let some women in, if there are any left. As to clergymen, we believe we have some of all our major faiths. Until we locate them, we have a man of no faith who is ready to minis

ter to the spiritual needs of people of all faiths. As to the outcome, I beg you not to worry. We have overlooked nothing. After our first strike, we have secret defensive-offensive planes ready for a second-strike aerial attack to destroy any weapons withstanding our first strike that might come back at us. The only thing you have to fear is fear itself. We are almost absolutely sure we may have nearly not much to worry about, thanks to our new old versions of the old new Stealth bomber, my own Strangelove B-Ware and the Minderbinder Shhhhh! There will be no newspapers. Since all reports will come from official sources, there'll be no reason to believe them, and they will be kept to a minimum. Haagen-Dazs."

"The Shhhhh!?" Yossarian was dumbfounded.

"I told you they'd work."

"Gaffney, what's going to happen?"

"I'm cut off from my sources."

Speeding downward in the elevator to the seven-mile level at a hundred miles an hour had taken close to five minutes. The rest of the way to the forty-two-mile bottom would take some twenty minutes more, and the two had agreed to continue awhile on the escalators.

"Can't you guess? Where will it all end?"

Gaffney had an answer. "Where it began, say the physicists. That's what I have in mind for the novel I might want to write. It begins after both those stories of the creation of Adam and Eve. There are two, you know."

"I know," said Yossarian.

"You would be surprised how many people don't. My story begins at the end of the sixth day of creation."

"And then where does it go?"

"Backward," crowed Gaffney, unveiling that idea for his novel as though it were already a triumph. "It goes backward, to the fifth day, like a movie running in reverse. At the beginning of mine, God turns Eve back into a rib and puts the rib back into Adam, as we find in the second version. He simply uncreates Adam and Eve from his own image, as we find in the first, as though they'd never been made. He simply disappears them, along with the cattle and other beasts and creeping things brought forth on that sixth day. On my second day, his fifth, the birds and fish are taken back. Next, the sun and moon are gone, along with the other lights in the firmament. Then the fruit trees and vegetation from the third day are taken away and the waters come back together and the dry land called earth disappears. That was the third day, and on the one after that, he takes back the firmament called heaven that was put in the midst of the waters. And then on the first day, my sixth day, the light goes too and nothing remains to separate the day from the darkness, and the earth is again without form and void. We are back to the beginning, before there was anything. Then I steal from the New Testament for a very clever touch. In the beginning was the word and the word was God, remember? Now, of course, we take away the word, and without the word, there is no God. What do you think of it?"

Yossarian said caustically: "Children will love it."

"Will it make a good movie? Because for a sequel, the whole thing starts all over again in two or three billion years and is recreated exactly the same way, to the tiniest detail."