Page 5

"And the rest is coming from a terrific plan I have."

"I wish I had a plan like that," Leon sulked.

It came, explained Yossarian, from the company for which he worked, where he was still on the books in a semi-executive capacity as a semi-retired semi-consultant and could remain for a lifetime provided he never tried to get much done.

"I wish I had a job like that. What the hell does it mean?" Leon mimicked in sneering derision: "Yossarian, John. Occupation: semi-retired semi-consultant. What the hell are our epidemiologists supposed to make of that one?"

"It's been another one of my careers. I work part of the time for all of my fee and no one listens to more than half the things I say. I would call that a semi-retired semi-consultant, wouldn't you? The company pays for everything. We are as large as Harold Strangelove Associates and almost as lovable. We are M & M Enterprises & Associates. I am one of the associates. The other people are enterprising. I associate, they enterprise."

"What do they really do?"

"Whatever makes money and isn't dishonestly criminal, I suppose," Yossarian answered.

"Is one word of this true?"

"I have no way of knowing. They can lie to me as well as to everyone else. We keep secrets from each other. I'm not making it up. You can check. Tie me back up to that heart machine and see if it skips a beat when I tell a lie."

"Will it do that?" Leon asked with surprise.

"I don't see why it wouldn't."

"What do you do there?"

"I object."

"Don't get so touchy."

"I'm answering your question," Yossarian informed him pleasantly. "I object to matters that are not up to my ethical standards. Sometimes I work very hard at objecting. Then they go ahead or don't. I am the conscience of the company, a moral presence, and that's another one of the things I've been doing since I dropped by there more than twenty years ago for illegal help in keeping my children out of the Vietnam War. How'd you keep yours out?"

"Medical school. Of course, they both switched to business administration as soon as the danger was past. By the way, my grapevine tells me you still seem to be having a pretty hot time with one of our favorite floor nurses."

"Better than I'm having with you and your associates."

"She's a very nice girl and a very good nurse."

"I think I've noticed."

"Attractive too."

"I've seen that also."

"We have a number of very fine specialists here who tell me frankly they'd like to get into her pants."

"That's crude, Leon, really crude, and you ought to be ashamed," Yossarian rebuked him with disgust. "It's a most obscene way of saying you'd all like to fuck her."

Leon was sheepish and Yossarian manipulated this momentary loss of self-possession into a favor involving a No Visitors sign outside the door, which was in place before the next one came by to disturb him.

The knock was so diffident that Yossarian hoped for an instant the chaplain was back as a free man from wherever it was that he was being lawfully detained unlawfully. Yossarian was out of ideas to aid him and just about helpless there too.

But it was only Michael, his youngest son, the underachiever among four adult children in what used to be a family. In addition to Michael there were his daughter, Gillian, a judge in a very low court; Julian, his eldest, another overachiever; and Adrian, who was average and content and was disregarded by the others because he was only average. Michael, unmarried, unsettled, unemployed, and unobjectionable, had stopped by to see what he was doing in the hospital still again and to confess that he was thinking of dropping out of law school because he found the work there no more stimulating than the medical school, business school, art school, graduate school of architecture, and several other graduate schools of assorted character he had been dropping out of after brief trials for as long now, it seemed, as anyone wanted to remember.

"Oh, shit," mourned Yossarian. "I keep pulling strings to get you in, and you keep dropping out."

"I can't help it," Michael said with discouragement. "The more I find out about the practice of law, the more I'm surprised that it isn't illegal."

"That's one of the reasons I gave that up too. How old are you now?"

"I'm not far from forty."