'Thank you, Sergeant, I think I will,' said Appleby. 'About how long will I have to wait? I've still got a lot to get done today so that I can be fully prepared bright and early tomorrow morning to go into combat the minute they want me to.'
'Sir?'
'What's that, Sergeant?'
'What was your question?'
'About how long will I have to wait before I can go in to see the major?'
'Just until he goes out to lunch,' Sergeant Towser replied. 'Then you can go right in.'
'But he won't be there then. Will he?'
'No, sir. Major Major won't be back in his office until after lunch.'
'I see,' Appleby decided uncertainly. 'I think I'd better come back after lunch, then.' Appleby turned from the orderly room in secret confusion. The moment he stepped outside, he thought he saw a tall, dark officer who looked a little like Henry Fonda come jumping out of the window of the orderly-room tent and go scooting out of sight around the corner. Appleby halted and squeezed his eyes closed. An anxious doubt assailed him. He wondered if he were suffering from malaria, or, worse, from an o
verdose of Atabrine tablets. Appleby had been taking four times as many Atabrine tablets as the amount prescribed because he wanted to be four times as good a pilot as everyone else. His eyes were still shut when Sergeant Towser tapped him lightly on the shoulder and told him he could go in now if he wanted to, since Major Major had just gone out. Appleby's confidence returned.
'Thank you, Sergeant. Will he be back soon?'
'He'll be back right after lunch. Then you'll have to go right out and wait for him in front till he leaves for dinner. Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he's in his office.'
'Sergeant, what did you just say?'
'I said that Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he's in his office.' Appleby stared at Sergeant Towser intently and attempted a firm tone. 'Sergeant, are you trying to make a fool out of me just because I'm new in the squadron and you've been overseas a long time?'
'Oh, no, sir,' answered the sergeant deferentially. 'Those are my orders. You can ask Major Major when you see him.'
'That's just what I intend to do, Sergeant. When can I see him?'
'Never.' Crimson with humiliation, Appleby wrote down his report about Yossarian and the Atabrine tablets on a pad the sergeant offered him and left quickly, wondering if perhaps Yossarian were not the only man privileged to wear an officer's uniform who was crazy.
By the time Colonel Cathcart had raised the number of missions to fifty-five, Sergeant Towser had begun to suspect that perhaps every man who wore a uniform was crazy. Sergeant Towser was lean and angular and had fine blond hair so light it was almost without color, sunken cheeks, and teeth like large white marshmallows. He ran the squadron and was not happy doing it. Men like Hungry Joe glowered at him with blameful hatred, and Appleby subjected him to vindictive discourtesy now that he had established himself as a hot pilot and a ping-pong player who never lost a point. Sergeant Towser ran the squadron because there was no one else in the squadron to run it. He had no interest in war or advancement. He was interested in shards and Hepplewhite furniture.
Almost without realizing it, Sergeant Towser had fallen into the habit of thinking of the dead man in Yossarian's tent in Yossarian's own terms &mash; as a dead man in Yossarian's tent. In reality, he was no such thing. He was simply a replacement pilot who had been killed in combat before he had officially reported for duty. He had stopped at the operations tent to inquire the way to the orderly-room tent and had been sent right into action because so many men had completed the thirty-five missions required then that Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren were finding it difficult to assemble the number of crews specified by Group. Because he had never officially gotten into the squadron, he could never officially be gotten out, and Sergeant Towser sensed that the multiplying communications relating to the poor man would continue reverberating forever.
His name was Mudd. To Sergeant Towser, who deplored violence and waste with equal aversion, it seemed like such an abhorrent extravagance to fly Mudd all the way across the ocean just to have him blown into bits over Orvieto less than two hours after he arrived. No one could recall who he was or what he had looked like, least of all Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren, who remembered only that a new officer had shown up at the operations tent just in time to be killed and who colored uneasily every time the matter of the dead man in Yossarian's tent was mentioned. The only one who might have seen Mudd, the men in the same plane, had all been blown to bits with him.
Yossarian, on the other hand, knew exactly who Mudd was. Mudd was the unknown soldier who had never had a chance, for that was the only thing anyone ever did know about all the unknown soldiers--they never had a chance. They had to be dead. And this dead one was really unknown, even though his belongings still lay in a tumble on the cot in Yossarian's tent almost exactly as he had left them three months earlier the day he never arrived--all contaminated with death less than two hours later, in the same way that all was contaminated with death in the very next week during the Great Big Siege of Bologna when the moldy odor of mortality hung wet in the air with the sulphurous fog and every man scheduled to fly was already tainted.
There was no escaping the mission to Bologna once Colonel Cathcart had volunteered his group for the ammunition dumps there that the heavy bombers on the Italian mainland had been unable to destroy from their higher altitudes. Each day's delay deepened the awareness and deepened the gloom. The clinging, overpowering conviction of death spread steadily with the continuing rainfall, soaking mordantly into each man's ailing countenance like the corrosive blot of some crawling disease. Everyone smelled of formaldehyde. There was nowhere to turn for help, not even to the medical tent, which had been ordered closed by Colonel Korn so that no one could report for sick call, as the men had done on the one clear day with a mysterious epidemic of diarrhea that had forced still another postponement. With sick call suspended and the door to the medical tent nailed shut, Doc Daneeka spent the intervals between rain perched on a high stool, wordlessly absorbing the bleak outbreak of fear with a sorrowing neutrality, roosting like a melancholy buzzard below the ominous, hand-lettered sign tacked up on the closed door of the medical tent by Captain Black as a joke and left hanging there by Doc Daneeka because it was no joke. The sign was bordered in dark crayon and read: 'CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. DEATH IN THE FAMILY.' The fear flowed everywhere, into Dunbar's squadron, where Dunbar poked his head inquiringly through the entrance of the medical tent there one twilight and spoke respectfully to the blurred outline of Dr. Stubbs, who was sitting in the dense shadows inside before a bottle of whiskey and a bell jar filled with purified drinking water.
'Are you all right?' he asked solicitously.
'Terrible,' Dr. Stubbs answered.
'What are you doing here?'
'Sitting.'
'I thought there was no more sick call.'
'There ain't.'
'Then why are you sitting here?'
'Where else should I sit? At the goddam officers' club with Colonel Cathcart and Korn? Do you know what I'm doing here?'