ANYONE CAN PLAY.
ANY SIDE CAN WIN.
Yossarian moved by games named Indianapolis Speedway, Bombs Away, Beat the Draft, and Die Laughing. The place of prominence in the Presidential Game Room contained a video screen grander than the others and, waist-high, on a surface with the proportions and foundations of a billiard table, a transparent contour map of the country, vivid with different hues of green, black, blue, and desert pinks and tans. On the colorful replica were sets of electric trains on labyrinths of tracks that crossed the continent on different planes and went belowground through tunnels. When Noodles, with an enigmatic smile, pressed the buttons that turned on bright internal lights and set the trains running, Yossarian perceived a model of a whole new miniature world of vast and hermetic complexity functioning beneath the surface of the continent on different plateaus, extending from border to border, through boundaries northward into Canada to Alaska, and eastward and westward to the oceans. The name for this game read: TRIAGE On the map, he spotted first, in the peninsula state of Florida, a tiny cabin-shaped marker labeled Federal Citrus Reservoir. Large numbers of the railroad cars traveling underground were mounted with missiles, and many others carried cannons and transported armored vehicles. He saw several medical trains marked with a red cross. His eyes found a Federal Wisconsin Cheese Depository on the banks of Lake Michigan not far from Kenosha. He noted another Citrus Fruit Reservoir in California and a nationwide subterranean dispersion of pizza parlors and meat lockers. There was the nuclear reactor at the Savannah River, about which he now knew. Star-shaped Washington, D. C. was enlarged in blue within a white circle; he read markers there for the White House, the Burning Tree Country Club, MASSPOB, the new National Military Cemetery, the newest war memorial, and Walter Reed Hospital. And underground beneath every one of these, if he comprehended what he was looking at, was a perfect reconstruction of each concealed on a lower tier. Traveling out from the capital city were directional arrows paralleling the train tracks leadings by subterranean route to destinations including the Greenbrier; Country Club in West Virginia, the Livermore Laboratories in California, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the Burn Treatment Center at New York Hospital, and also in New York City, he noted with tremendous surprise, PABT, the bus terminal so close to the building that was presently his home.
He was stunned to find PABT joined to MASSPOB and incorporated in a local network with an underground tentacle that slithered through the buried canal under Canal Street and a wall walling off Wall Street. In Brooklyn, he saw Coney Island symbolized on the surface by an iron-red miniature of a phallic tower he recognized as the defunct parachute jump of the old Steeplechase Park. And underground, on what appeared to be a facsimile of an amusement park, Steeplechase Park, was a sketch of a grinning face with flat hair and lots of teeth, which he also knew.
"But ours work," Noodles told him with pride. "Or they wouldn't be on our map. He had this whole model built to make sure it's as good as the one in the game. If there's one word he lives by, it's be prepared."
"fThat's two words, isn't it?" corrected Yossarian.
"I used to think that way too," said Noodles, "but now I see it his way. I'm getting better at golf also."
"Is that why those country clubs are there?"
"He's putting them into the video game so they'll both match. See up there in Vermont?" Yossarian saw a Ben amp; Jerry Federal Ice Cream Depository. "He found that one in the video game only a little while ago, and now he wants one too. We'll also have Haagen-Dazs. We may be underneath a long time when it ever comes to that, and he wants to be sure of his ice cream and his golf. This is confidential, but we already have a nine-hole course finished underneath Burning Tree, and it's identical to the one up here. He's down there now, practicing the course so he'll have an advantage over others when the time comes."
"Who would those others be?" asked Yossarian.
"Those of us who've been chosen to survive," answered Noodles, "and to keep the country running underground when there's not much left above."
"I see. When would that be?"
"When he unlocks the box and presses the button. You see that second unit beside the game? That's the Football."
"What football?"
"Newspapermen like to call it the Football. It's the unit that will launch all our planes and defensive-offensive weapons as soon as there's word of the big attack or we decide to launch our own war. That will have to happen, sooner or later."
"I know that. What happens then?"
"We go down below, the little prick and I, until the embers cool and the radiation blows away. Along with the rest who've been picked to survive."
"Who does the picking?"
"The National Bipartisan Triage Committee. They've picked themselves, of course, and their best friends."
"Who's on it?"
"Nobody's sure."
"What happens to me and my best friends?"
"You're all disposable, of course."
"That sounds fair," said Yossarian.
"It's a pity we don't have time for a game now," said Noodles. "It's something to watch when we're fighting each other for purified water. Would you like to begin one?"
"I'm meeting a lady friend in the aeronautical museum of the Smithsonian."
"'And I have a history lesson to give when he gets back from his golf. That part isn't easy."
"Do you learn a lot?" Yossarian teased.
"We both learn a lot," said Noodles, offended. "Well, Yossarian, it will soon be Thanksgiving, and we ought to talk turkey. How much will you want?"
"For what?"
"For getting me that speaking engagement. You're in for a piece, naturally. Name your price."
"Noodles," said Yossarian in censure, "I couldn't take anything. That would be a kickback. I don't want a penny."
"That sounds fair," said Noodles, and grinned. "You see what a bigger shit I am? That's one more I owe you."
"There's that one I do want," Yossarian remembered later he had requested earnestly. "I want the chaplain set free."
And at that point Noodles had turned grave. "I've tried. There are complications. They don't know what to do with him and are sorry now they ever found him. If they could dispose of him safely as radioactive waste, I think they would do it."
After the tritium, they had to see what came out of the chaplain next. Plutonium would be dreadful. And worse, lithium, that medication of choice he'd been receiving for his depression, bonded with heavy water into the lithium deuteride of the hydrogen bomb, and that could be a catastrophe.
26 Yossarian
Noodles Cook had his history lesson to prepare and Yossarian had his date at the museum. Yossarian was remembering Noodles a week later when he drew near PABT and heard the tiny steam whistles of the nearby vendors of hot peanuts. These brought back to mind the tuneful phrases of the "Forest Murmurs" in Siegfried, and the struggle for that magic ring of stolen gold that supposedly conferred world power on anyone who owned it-and brought doleful misery and ruin to all those who did. As he pushed through the doors to enter the bus terminal, he envisioned that Germanic hero, who was only Icelandic, at the lair of the dormant dragon that was lying there minding its own business. "Let me sleep," was the growling thanks to wretched king-god Wotan, who, in mournful, frustrated hopes of getting back that ring in gratitude, had come sneaking up to warn him of the fearless hero approaching.
Young Siegfried had his dragon to face, and Yossarian had those savage dogs below at the entrance to that mysterious underworld of basements that McBride now had license to inspect.