Another time in New York he looked through his window at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at an hour when a meeting of ACACAMMA was disbanding, and he was certain again that he saw Yossarian leaving in the company of an elderly woman in fashionable dress and a man taller than both, and he wanted to cry out again, for this time he observed a man with red hair and a green rucksack eyeing the three craftily and falling in behind them, and then two other men, with brighter orange hair, following also, and behind them came still another man, who unmistakably was following them all. He distrusted his eyes. He felt he must be seeing things again, like that time of the vision of the man in the tree.
"And what is that other noise I continue to hear?" the chaplain finally inquired of General Groves, when they were rolling again and moving out of the city.
"You mean of water? That stream or river?"
"I hear it often. Maybe all the time "
"I can't say." I "You don't know?"
"My orders are to tell you everything I do know. That one is out of my jurisdiction. It's more secret and lower down. We know from our sonar that it's a fairly narrow, slow-moving body of water and that small boats without power, maybe rowboats, come by on it regularly, moving always in one direction. There's music too. The pieces have been identified as the prelude and wedding march from the third act of the opera Lohengrin." And faintly underlying that music, from someplace deeper, was an unrelated children's chorus of anguish that the government musicologists had not yet been able to identify. Germany was consulted and was in anguish also over the existence in performance of a choral piece of advanced musical complexity, perhaps genius, of which they knew nothing. "The water is on my papers as the river Rhine. That's all I know."
"The Rhine River?" The chaplain was awed.
"No. The river Rhine. We are not in Germany now."
They were back in the nation's capital.
There was no good reason to doubt General Groves, who made a noticeable point of being present at all the sessions with Ace, Butch, and Slugger. The chaplain understood that even the general's friendship might be no more than a calculated tactic in a larger strategy involving a clandestine plot with the three intelligence men, of whom he was most in fear. There was no way of knowing anything, he knew, not even that there was no way of knowing anything.
"'I often feel that same way," the general was quick to agree, when he voiced his misgivings.
"Me too," admitted the psychiatrist.
Was the sympathizing psychiatrist also a trick?
"You've no right to do this to me," the chaplain protested to General Groves when they were again alone. "I think I know that much."
"You're mistaken, I'm afraid," answered the general. "I think you'll find that we have a right to do to you anything you can't stop us from doing. In this case, it's both legal and regular. You were a member of the army reserves. They've simply called you back into service."
"But I was discharged from the reserves," responded the chaplain with triumph. "I have the letter to prove it."
"I don't think you do anymore, Chaplain. And it doesn't show in our records."
"Oh, yes it does," said the chaplain, gloating. "You can find it in my Freedom of Information file. I saw it there with my own eyes."
"Chaplain, when you look again, you'll find it's been blacked out. You're not completely innocent, you know."
"Of what am I guilty?"
"Of offenses the intelligence agents don't know about yet. Why won't you say that you're guilty?"
"How can I say if they won't tell me what they are?"
"How can they tell you if they don't know? To begin with."
General Groves went on, in a more instructive tone, "there's this thing with the heavy water you're producing naturally and won't say how."
"I don't know how," protested the chaplain.
"It's not I who don't believe you. Then there's this second thing, with a man named Yossarian, John Yossarian. You paid him a mysterious visit in New York as soon as we found out about this. That's one of the reasons they picked you up."
"There was nothing mysterious about it. I went to see him when all of this started to happen. He was in a hospital."
"What was wrong with him?"
"Nothing. He wasn't sick."
"Yet in a hospital? Try to imagine, Albert, how most of this sounds. He was in that hospital at the same time a Belgian agent with throat cancer was there. That man is from Brussels, and Brussels is the center of the EEC. Is that coincidence too? He has cancer of the throat but doesn't get better and doesn't die. How come? In addition, there are these coded messages about him to your friend Yossarian. They go out to him four or five times a day from this woman who pretends she just likes to talk to him on the telephone. I've not met a woman like that. Have you? Now his kidney is failing again, she says, just yesterday. Why should his kidney be failing and not yours? You're the one with the heavy water. I have no opinion. I don't know any more about these things than I do about the prelude to Act III of Lohengrin or a chorus of children singing in anguish. I'm giving you the questions raised by others. There's even a deep suspicion the Belgian is with the CIA. There's even some belief that you're CIA."
"I'm not! I swear I've never been with the CIA!"
"I'm not the one you have to convince. These messages go out from the hospital through Yossarian's nurse."
"Nurse?" cried the chaplain. "Is Yossarian ill?"
"He is fit as a fiddle, Albert, and in better shape than you or I."
"Then why does he have a nurse?"
"For carnal gratification. They have been indulging themselves in sexual congress one way or another now four or five times a week"-the general looked down punctiliously at a line graph on his lap to make absolutely sure-"in his office, in her apartment, and in his apartment, often on the floor of the kitchen with the water running or on the floor of one of the other rooms, beneath the air conditioner. Although I see on this chart that the frequency of libidinous contact is diminishing sharply. The honeymoon may be ending. He no longer sends her long-stemmed red roses often or talks as much about lingerie, according to this latest Gaffney Report."
The chaplain was squirming beneath these accumulating personal details. "Please."
"I'm merely trying to fill you in." The general turned to another page. "And then there's this secret arrangement you seem to have with Mr. Milo Minderbinder that you have not seen fit to mention."
" Milo Minderbinder?" The chaplain's reaction was one of incredulity. "I know him, of course. He sends these packages. I don't know why. I was in the war with him, but I haven't seen or spoken to him in almost fifty years."
"Come, Chaplain, come." Now the general feigned a look of exaggerated disappointment. "Albert, Milo Minderbinder claims ownership of you, has a patent pending on you, has registered a trademark for your brand of heavy water, with a halo, no less. He has offered you to the government in conjunction with a contract for a military airplane for which he is vying, and he receives weekly a very, very hefty payment for every pint of heavy water we extract from you. You're amazed?"
"I've never heard any of this before!"
"Albert, he'd have no right to do that on his own."