"A foot is a foot, Mr. Minderbinder."
"One thing escapes me, Mr. Winkler. What does your shoe do that the ones I'm wearing will not?"
"Make money for both of us, Mr. Minderbinder. Mine is state-of-the-art. Look down at the difference."
"I'm beginning to see. Are you very rich?"
"I've had trouble with my timing. But believe me, Mr. Minderbinder, I'm not without experience. You are doing business with the man who devised and still manufactures the state-of-the-art chocolate Easter bunny."
"What was so different about yours?"
"It was made of chocolate. It could be packaged, shipped, displayed, and, best of all, eaten, like candy."
"Isn't that true of other Easter bunnies?"
"But mine was state-of-the-art. We print that on every package. The public did not want a second-rate chocolate Easter bunny, and our government does not want a second-rate shoe."
"I see, I see," said Milo, brightening. "You know about chocolate?"
"All that there is to know."
"Tell me something. Please try one of these."
"Of course," said Winkler, taking the bonbon and relishing the prospect of eating it. "What is it?"
"Chocolate-covered cotton. What do you think of it?"
Delicately, as though handling something rare, fragile, and repulsive, Winkler lifted the mass from his tongue, while maintaining a smile. "I've never tasted better chocolate-covered cotton. It's state-of-the-art."
"Unfortunately, I seem unable to move it."
"I can't see why. Have you very much?"
"Warehouses full. Have you any ideas?"
"That's where I'm best. I will think of one while you bring my shoe to your procurer in Washington."
"That will definitely be done."
"Then consider this: Remove the chocolate from the cotton. Weave the cotton into fine fabric for shirts and bedsheets. We build today by breaking up. You've been putting together. We get bigger today by getting smaller. You can sell the chocolate to me for my business at a wonderful price for the money I receive from you for my shoe."
"How many shoes do you have now?"
"At the moment, just the pair I'm wearing, and another one at home in my closet. I can gear up for millions as soon as we have a contract and I receive in front all the money I'll need to cover my costs of production. I like money in front, Mr. Minderbinder. That's the only way I do business."
"That sounds fair," said Milo Minderbinder. "I work that way too. Unfortunately, we have a Department of Ethics now in Washington. But our lawyer will be in charge there once he gets out of prison. Meanwhile, we have our private procurers. You will have your contract, Mr. Winkler, for a deal is a deal."
"Thank you, Mr. Minderbinder. Can I send you a bunny for Easter? I can put you on our complimentary list."
"Yes, please do that. Send me a thousand dozen."
"And whom shall I bill?"
"Someone will pay. We both understand that there is no such thing as a free lunch."
"Thank you for the lunch, Mr. Minderbinder. I go away with good news."
"I come with good news," called Angela buoyantly, and swept into the hospital room in an ecstasy of jubilation. "But Melissa thinks you might be angry."
"She's found a new fellow."
"No, not yet."
"She's gone back to the old one."
"There's no chance of that. She's late."
"For what?"
"With her period. She thinks she's pregnant."
Defiantly, Melissa said she wanted the child, and the time left to have a child was not unlimited for either one of them.
"But how can it be?" complained Yossarian, at this end to his Rhine Journey. "You said you had your tubes tied."
"You said you had a vasectomy."
"I was kidding when I said that."
"I didn't know. So I was kidding too."
"Ahem, ahem, excuse me," said Winkler, when he could endure no more. "We have business to finish. Yossarian, I owe everything to you. How much money will you want?"
"For what?"
"For setting up that meeting. I am in your debt. Name what you want."
"I don't want any of it."
"That sounds fair."
29 Mr. Tilyou
Securely ensconced in his afterlife in a world of his own, Mr. George C. Tilyou, dead now just about eighty years, took pleasure in contemplating his possessions and watching the time go by, because time didn't. Purely for adornment, he wore in his waistcoat a gold watch on a gold chain with a snaggletooth pendant of green bloodstone, but it remained unwound.
There were intervals between occurrences, naturally, but no point in measuring them. The rides on both roller-coasters, his Dragon's Gorge and Tornado, and on his Steeplechase Horses, all governed by the constants of gravity and friction, never varied noticeably from beginning to end, and neither did the water journey by boat through his Tunnel of Love. He could, of course, alter the duration on his El Dorado carousel and enlarge or decrease the circlings on the Whip, Caterpillar, Whirlpool, and Pretzel. There was no added cost. Here nothing went to waste. The iron wouldn't rust, paint didn't peel. There was no dust or refuse anywhere. His wing-collared shirt was always clean. His yellow house looked as fresh as the day fifty years before on which he had finally brought it down. Wood did not warp or rot, windows did not stick, glass did not break, plumbing would not even drip. His boats did not leak. It was not that time stood still. There was no time. Mr. Tilyou exulted in the permanence, the eternal stability. Here was a place where the people would not grow older. There would always be new ones, and their number would never grow less. It was a concessionaire's dream.
Once he had back his house, there was nothing on earth he wanted that he did not have. He kept abreast of conditions outside through the felicitous fellowship of General Leslie Groves, who came by periodically to chat and make enjoyable use of the amusements offered, arriving at his railroad siding in his private train. General Groves brought newspapers and weekly newsmagazines that simply vanished into thin air, like all other trash, after Mr. Tilyou had finished skimming only those rare stories peculiar enough to merit his perusal. Punctually too, every three months to the day, a Mr. Gaffney, a pleasant acquaintance of a different order who worked as a private investigator, dropped in from above to find out all he could about anything new. Mr. Tilyou did not tell him everything. Mr. Gaffney was remarkable for his civility and dress, and Mr. Tilyou looked forward ro his alighting there for good. Sometimes General Groves arrived with a guest he thought fitting for Mr. Tilyou to know beforehand. Mr. Tilyou had men and women in abundance and no express need for ministers, and he felt far from slighted upon hearing that the chaplain General Groves had spoken of had declined to be introduced to him. In the larger den in one of the two railroad coaches encompassing the elegant living quarters of General Groves, Mr. Tilyou could entertain himself in singular fashion by peering at the glass pane in any of the windows and, once acquainted with the controls, looking out at just about any place in the world. Usually, he wanted only New York City, and mostly those parts of Brooklyn he thought of as his stamping grounds and his burial ground: the carnival area of Coney Island, and Green-Wood Cemetery in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn, in which, in 1914, he had been laid, temporarily, he could now complacently certify, to rest.
The site on which his house had stood remained a vacant space, a parking lot for visitors in high season who now had automobiles. Where his spangled wonderland had flourished famously now functioned objects of lesser reputation. Nowhere he looked was there any new thing under the sun he envied. His gilded age had passed. He saw decline and corrosion at the end of an era. If Paris was France, as he'd been wont to repeat, Coney Island in summer certainly was no longer the world, and he congratulated himself on having gotten out in time.
He could play with the color of things in the windows of General Groves's railroad car, could see the sun go black and the moon turn to blood. The modern skylines of large metropolises did not appeal to his sense of the appropriate and proportionate. He beheld soaring buildings and gigantic commercial enterprises that were not owned by anybody, and this impressed him with a negative dismay. People bought shares of stock which they might not ever see, and these shares had not one thing to do with ownership or control. He himself, as a matter of scale and responsible moral behavior, had always put effort and capital into only such projects as would in entirety be his, and to own only such things as he could see and watch and wish personally to make use of with a satisfaction and pleasure enjoyed by others.