“It teaches me the evil of candy.”

“Can’t you see that you’re not exactly without blame for the predicament you’re in?” Clevinger had continued with undisguised relish. “If you hadn’t been laid up in the hospital with venereal disease for ten days back there in Africa, you might have finished your twenty-five missions in time to be sent home before Colonel Nevers was killed and Colonel Cathcart came to replace him.”

“And what about you?” Yossarian had replied. “You never got clap in Marrakech and you’re in the same predicament.”

“I don’t know,” confessed Clevinger, with a trace of mock concern. “I guess I must have done something very bad in my time.”

“Do you really believe that?”

Clevinger laughed. “No, of course not. I just like to kid you along a little.”

There were too many dangers for Yossarian to keep track of. There was Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, for example, and they were all out to kill him. There was Lieutenant Scheisskopf with his fanaticism for parades and there was the bloated colonel with his big fat mustache and his fanaticism for retribution, and they wanted to kill him, too. There was Appleby, Havermeyer, Black and Korn. There was Nurse Cramer and Nurse Duckett, who he was almost certain wanted him dead, and there was the Texan and the C.I.D. man, about whom he had no doubt. There were bartenders, bricklayers and bus conductors all over the world who wanted him dead, landlords and tenants, traitors and patriots, lynchers, leeches and lackeys, and they were all out to bump him off. That was the secret Snowden had spilled to him on the mission to Avignon-they were out to get him; and Snowden had spilled it all over the back of the plane.

There were lymph glands that might do him in. There were kidneys, nerve sheaths and corpuscles. There were tumors of the brain. There was Hodgkin’s disease, leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There were fertile red meadows of epithelial tissue to catch and coddle a cancer cell. There were diseases of the skin, diseases of the bone, diseases of the lung, diseases of the stomach, diseases of the heart, blood and arteries. There were diseases of the head, diseases of the neck, diseases of the chest, diseases of the intestines, diseases of the crotch. There even were diseases of the feet. There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and every one was a potential traitor and foe. There were so many diseases that it took a truly diseased mind to even think about them as often as he and Hungry Joe did.

Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about. He grew very upset whenever he misplaced some or when he could not add to his list, and he would go rushing in a cold sweat to Doc Daneeka for help.

“Give him Ewing’s tumor,” Yossarian advised Doc Daneeka, who would come to Yossarian for help in handling Hungry Joe, “and follow it up with melanoma. Hungry Joe likes lingering diseases, but he likes the fulminating ones even more.”

Doc Daneeka had never heard of either. “How do you manage to keep up on so many diseases like that?” he inquired with high professional esteem.

“I learn about them at the hospital when I study the Reader’s Digest.”

Yossarian had so many ailments to be afraid of that he was sometimes tempted to turn himself in to the hospital for good and spend the rest of his life stretched out there inside an oxygen tent with a battery of specialists and nurses seated at one side of his bed twenty-four hours a day waiting for something to go wrong and at least one surgeon with a knife poised at the other, ready to jump forward and begin cutting away the moment it became necessary. Aneurisms, for instance; how else could they ever defend him in time against an aneurism of the aorta? Yossarian felt much safer inside the hospital than outside the hospital, even though he loathed the surgeon and his knife as much as he had ever loathed anyone. He could start screaming inside a hospital and people would at least come running to try to help; outside the hospital they would throw him in prison if he ever started screaming about all the things he felt everyone ought to start screaming about, or they would put him in the hospital. One of the things he wanted to start screaming about was the surgeon’s knife that was almost certain to be waiting for him and everyone else who lived long enough to die. He wondered often how he would ever recognize the first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze, stain, lethargy, vocal slip, loss of balance or lapse of memory that would signal the inevitable beginning of the inevitable end.

He was afraid also that Doc Daneeka would still refuse to help him when he went to him again after jumping out of Major Major’s office, and he was right.

“You think you’ve got something to be afraid about?” Doc Daneeka demanded, lifting his delicate immaculate dark head up from his chest to gaze at Yossarian irascibly for a moment with lachrymose eyes. “What about me? My precious medical skills are rusting away here on this lousy island while other doctors are cleaning up. Do you think I enjoy sitting here day after day refusing to help you? I wouldn’t mind it so much if I could refuse to help you back in the States or in some place like Rome. But saying no to you here isn’t easy for me, either.”

“Then stop saying no. Ground me.”

“I can’t ground you,” Doc Daneeka mumbled. “How many times do you have to be told?”

“Yes you can. Major Major told me you’re the only one in the squadron who can ground me.”

Doc Daneeka was stunned. “Major Major told you that? When?”

“When I tackled him in the ditch.”

“Major Major told you that? In a ditch?”

“He told me in his office after we left the ditch and jumped inside. He told me not to tell anyone he told me, so don’t start shooting your mouth off.”

“Why that dirty, scheming liar!” Doc Daneeka cried. “He wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. Did he tell you how I could ground you?”

“Just by filling out a little slip of paper saying I’m on the verge of a nervous collapse and sending it to Group. Dr. Stubbs grounds men in his squadron all the time, so why can’t you?”

“And what happens to the men after Stubbs does ground them?” Doc Daneeka retorted with a sneer. “They go right back on combat status, don’t they? And he finds himself right up the creek. Sure, I can ground you by filling out a slip saying you’re unfit to fly. But there’s a catch.”

“Catch-22?”

“Sure. If I take you off combat duty, Group has to approve my action, and Group isn’t going to. They’ll put you right back on combat status, and then where will I be? On my way to the Pacific Ocean, probably. No, thank you. I’m not going to take any chances for you.”

“Isn’t it worth a try?” Yossarian argued. “What’s so hot about Pianosa?”

“Pianosa is terrible. But it’s better than the Pacific Ocean. I wouldn’t mind being shipped someplace civilized where I might pick up a buck or two in abortion money every now and then. But all they’ve got in the Pacific is jungles and monsoons, I’d rot there.”

“You’re rotting here.”

Doc Daneeka flared up angrily. “Yeah? Well, at least I’m going to come out of this war alive, which is a lot more than you’re going to do.”

“That’s just what I’m trying to tell you, goddammit. I’m asking you to save my life.”

“It’s not my business to save lives,” Doc Daneeka retorted sullenly.

“What is your business?”

“I don’t know what my business is. All they ever told me was to uphold the ethics of my profession and never give testimony against another physician. Listen. You think you’re the only one whose life is in danger? What about me? Those two quacks I’ve got working for me in the medical tent still can’t find out what’s wrong with me.”