"That son of yours," began Leon Shumacher.
"The one on Wall Street?"
"All he wanted to hear was the bottom line. Now he won't want to invest more time here if you're not going to die. I told him you wouldn't."
"And I told him you would, naturally," said Dennis Teemer, in bathrobe and pajamas, livelier as a patient than as a doctor. His embarrassed wife told friends he was experimenting. "'For how much?' he wanted to bet me."
"You still think it's natural?" objected Yossarian.
"For us to die?"
"For me to die."
Teemer glanced aside. "I think it's natural."
"For you?"
"I think that's natural too. I believe in life."
"You lost me."
"Everything that's alive lives on things that are living, Yossarian. You and I take a lot. We have to give back."
"I met a particle physicist on a plane to Kenosha who says that everything living is made up of things that are not."
"I know that too."
"It doesn't make you laugh? It doesn't make you cry? It doesn't make you wonder?"
"In the beginning was the word," said Teemer. "And the word was gene. Now the word is quark. I'm a biologist, not a physicist, and I can't say 'quark.' That belongs to an invisible world of the lifeless. So I stick with the gene."
"So where is the difference between a living gene and a dead quark?"
"A gene isn't living and a quark isn't dead."
"I can't say 'quark' either without wanting to laugh."
"Quark."
"Quark."
"Quark, quark."
"You win," said Yossarian. "But is there a difference between us and that?"
"Nothing in a living cell is alive. Yet the heart pumps and the tongue talks. We both know that."
"Does a microbe? A mushroom?"
"They have no soul?" guessed the surgeon in training.
"There is no soul'," said the surgeon training him. "That's all in the head."
"Someone ought to tell the cardinal that."
"The cardinal knows it."
"Even a thought, even this thought, is just an electrical action between molecules."