Catch-22 - Heller, Joseph [158]
‘So?’ asked Yossarian. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘What’s wrong?’ Doc Daneeka cried. ‘If something doesn’t happen soon, Germany may surrender. And then we’ll all be sent to the Pacific!’ Yossarian gawked at Doc Daneeka in grotesque dismay. ‘Are you crazy? Do you know what you’re saying?’
‘Yeah, it’s easy for you to laugh,’ Doc Daneeka sneered.
‘Who the hell is laughing?’
‘At least you’ve got a chance. You’re in combat and might get killed. But what about me? I’ve got nothing to hope for.’
‘You’re out of your goddam head!’ Yossarian shouted at him emphatically, seizing him by the shirt front. ‘Do you know that? Now keep your stupid mouth shut and listen to me.’ Doc Daneeka wrenched himself away. ‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that. I’m a licensed physician.’
‘Then keep your stupid licensed physician’s mouth shut and listen to what they told me up at the hospital. I’m crazy. Did you know that?’
‘So?’
‘Really crazy.’
‘So?’
‘I’m nuts. Cuckoo. Don’t you understand? I’m off my rocker. They sent someone else home in my place by mistake. They’ve got a licensed psychiatrist up at the hospital who examined me, and that was his verdict. I’m really insane.’
‘So?’
‘So?’ Yossarian was puzzled by Doc Daneeka’s inability to comprehend. ‘Don’t you see what that means? Now you can take me off combat duty and send me home. They’re not going to send a crazy man out to be killed, are they?’
‘Who else will go?’
Catch-22
Dobbs
McWatt went, and McWatt was not crazy. And so did Yossarian, still walking with a limp, and when Yossarian had gone two more times and then found himself menaced by the rumor of another mission to Bologna, he limped determinedly into Dobbs’s tent early one warm afternoon, put a finger to his mouth and said, ‘Shush!’
‘What are you shushing him for?’ asked Kid Sampson, peeling a tangerine with his front teeth as he perused the dog-eared pages of a comic book. ‘He isn’t even saying anything.’
‘Screw,’ said Yossarian to Kid Sampson, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder toward the entrance of the tent.
Kid Sampson cocked his blond eyebrows discerningly and rose to co-operate. He whistled upward four times into his drooping yellow mustache and spurted away into the hills on the dented old green motorcycle he had purchased secondhand months before. Yossarian waited until the last faint bark of the motor had died away in the distance. Things inside the tent did not seem quite normal. The place was too neat. Dobbs was watching him curiously, smoking a fat cigar. Now that Yossarian had made up his mind to be brave, he was deathly afraid.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s kill Colonel Cathcart. We’ll do it together.’ Dobbs sprang forward off his cot with a look of wildest terror. ‘Shush!’ he roared. ‘Kill Colonel Cathcart? What are you talking about?’
‘Be quiet, damn it,’ Yossarian snarled. ‘The whole island will hear. Have you still got that gun?’
‘Are you crazy or something?’ shouted Dobbs. ‘Why should I want to kill Colonel Cathcart?’
‘Why?’ Yossarian stared at Dobbs with an incredulous scowl. ‘Why? It was your idea, wasn’t it? Didn’t you come to the hospital and ask me to do it?’ Dobbs smiled slowly. ‘But that was when I had only fifty-eight missions,’ he explained, puffing on his cigar luxuriously. ‘I’m all packed now and I’m waiting to go home. I’ve finished my sixty missions.’
‘So what?’ Yossarian replied. ‘He’s only going to raise them again.’
‘Maybe this time he won