BOOK FIVE

13 Tritium

Heavy water was up another two points, read the fax in the M amp; M office in Rockefeller Center in New York, on the same floor, and in much the same spot, in which Sammy Singer had spent almost all his adult working life with Time magazine, an office that, as Michael Yossarian again saw, had windows overlooking the fabled skating rink far below, the glittering, frozen centerpiece of the venerable Japanese real estate complex obtained for money earlier from the vanishing Rockefeller financial dynasty. The rink was the same site on which Sammy years before had, with Glenda, gone ice skating for the first time in his life, and didn't fall, and had gone again with her on more than one long lunch hour after they commenced seeing each other regularly, while she was still pressing him to come live with her in her West Side apartment, together with her three children and her remarkable frontier mother from Wisconsin, who approved of Sammy and departed gladly to live again with a sister on a small family farm after he did-none of the New York parents he knew, not even his own, were ever so gracefully self-sacrificing-and tritium, the gas derived from heavy water, had gained an additional two hundred and sixteen points on the international radioactive commodity exchanges in Geneva, Tokyo, Bonn, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, China, Pakistan, London, and New York. The rise in tritium was buoyed optimistically by the natural property of that hydrogen isotope to degenerate at a predictable rate in atomic weapons, necessitating periodic replenishment, and the enticing disposition of the gas to lessen in quantity between the time it was sealed by the shipper and the hour it was received by the purchaser, who, more commonly than not, was a manufacturer of novelties or marking devices with outer surfaces intrinsically luminous or an assembler and supplier of nuclear warheads.

Customers frequently reported receiving as much as forty percent less of the tritium than they had paid for and forty percent less than had been packed and shipped, with no indications of theft, diversion, or leakage.

The tritium simply was not there when delivered.

Not long before, a test shipment from merely one building to another to comprehend this loss resulted in no new information and the disappearance of three quarters of the tritium packed for the test. It was inaccurate to say, said a sheepish spokesman, that it disappeared into thin air. They were monitoring the air. The air was not thin and the tritium wasn't in it.

Despite the radiation and consequent potential as a galvanizer of cancer, tritium was still the material of choice for illuminated guides and dial faces, for gun sights for nighttime marksmanship, for icons like swastikas, crosses, Stars of David, and halos that glowed in the dark, and for the stupendous enhancement in the explosive yield of nuclear weapons.

Melissa MacIntosh's ravishing roommate, Angela Moore, whom Yossarian could no longer resist thinking of by any other name than Angela Moorecock, had by now already put forth to her elderly, gentlemanly employers the idea of luminescent items highlighting the more protuberant organs of copulation phosphorescently and had tested on buyers at the toy fair, men and women, her notion for a bedroom clock with a radiating face of tritium in a compound of paint in which the hour and minute hands were circumcised male members and the numbers were not numbers but a succession of nude female figures unfolding sensually and progressively with the hours in systematic stages of erotic trance until satiation was attained at the terminal hour of twelve. Yossarian got hot hearing her discourse on this inspiration for a consumer product in the cocktail lounge a day or two before she sucked him off the first time and sent him home because he was older than the men she was accustomed to and she was not sure she cared to know him more intimately than that, and afterward, because of Melissa's growing affection for him, along with a growing apprehension of AIDS, declined to suck him off a second time or oblige him in any equivalent way; and listening observantly to her rave that first time, he'd found himself with almost half a semi-hard-on, and he took her hand as they sat beside each other on the red velvet banquette at the plush cocktail lounge and rubbed it over the fly of his pants to let her feel for herself.

The great jump in explosive yield induced by the action of tritium in atomic warheads made possible an aesthetic reduction in the size and weight of the bombs, missiles, and shells devised, allowing a greater number to be carried by smaller implements of delivery like Milo 's projected bombers, and Strangelove's too, with no notable sacrifice in nuclear destructive capability.

The chaplain was up in value and completely safe.

14 Michael Yossarian

"When can I see him?" Michael Yossarian heard his father demand. His father's hair was thicker than his own and curly white, a color for which his brother Adrian was assiduously seeking a chemical formula for tinting; to a youthful, natural gray that would not be youthful on any man Yossarian's age and would not look natural.

"As soon as he's safe," answered M2, in a clean white shirt that was not yet rumpled, wet, or in need of ironing.

"Michael, didn't he just say the chaplain was safe?"

"It's what I thought I heard."

Michael smiled to himself. He pressed his brow against the pane of the glass window in order to gaze down intently at the ice rink below and its colorful kaleidoscope of leisurely skaters, wondering, with a downhearted presentiment of already having missed out on much, if there could possibly be abiding in that pastime rewards he might find diverting if ever he could bring himself to take the trouble to seek them. The reflecting oval of ice was ringed these days with drifting tides of panhandlers and vagrants, with working strollers on lunch and coffee breaks, with mounted policemen on daunting horses. Michael Yossarian would not dance; he could not get into the rhythm. He would not play golf, ski, or play tennis, and he knew already he would never ice-skate.

"I mean safe for us." He heard M2 defend himself plaintively and turned to watch. M2 appeared triumphantly prepared for the question he'd been asked. "He is safe for M amp; M Enterprises and cannot be appropriated by even Mercedes-Benz or the N amp; N Division of Nippon amp; Nippon Enterprises. Even Strangelove is barred. We will patent the chaplain as soon as we find out how he works, and we are looking for a trademark. We are thinking of a halo. Because he is a chaplain, of course, a Day-Glo halo. Maybe one that lights up in the dark, all night long."

"Why not tritium?"

"Tritium is expensive and radioactive. Michael, can you draw a halo?"

"It shouldn't be hard."

"We would want something cheerful but serious."

"I would try," said Michael, smiling again, "to make it serious, and it's hard to picture one that isn't cheerful."

"Where have they got him?" Yossarian wanted to know.

"In the same place, I would guess. I really don't know."

"Does your father know?"

"Do I know if he knows?"

"If you did would you tell me?"

"If he said that I could."

"If he said that you couldn't?"

"I would say I don't know."

"As you're saying right now. At least you're truthful."

"I try."

"Even when you lie. There's a paradox here. We are talking in circles."

"I went to divinity school."

"And what," said Yossarian, "do I tell the chaplain's wife? I'll be seeing her soon. If there's anyone else I can advise her to complain to, I will certainly tell her."

"Who could she find? The police are helpless."