Catch-22 - Heller, Joseph [229]
‘But General Dreedle isn’t with us any more,’ said Colonel Korn, ‘so we can’t take him outside and shoot him.’ Now that his moment of tension with Colonel Cathcart had passed, Colonel Korn relaxed again and resumed kicking softly against Colonel Cathcart’s desk. He returned to Yossarian. ‘So we’re going to send you home instead. It took a bit of thinking, but we finally worked out this horrible little plan for sending you home without causing too much dissatisfaction among the friends you’ll leave behind. Doesn’t that make you happy?’
‘What kind of plan? I’m not sure I’m going to like it.’
‘I know you’re not going to like it.’ Colonel Korn laughed, locking his hands contentedly on top of his head again. ‘You’re going to loathe it. It really is odious and certainly will offend your conscience. But you’ll agree to it quickly enough. You’ll agree to it because it will send you home safe and sound in two weeks, and because you have no choice. It’s that or a court-martial. Take it or leave it.’ Yossarian snorted. ‘Stop bluffing, Colonel. You can’t court-martial me for desertion in the face of the enemy. It would make you look bad and you probably couldn’t get a conviction.’
‘But we can court-martial you now for desertion from duty, since you went to Rome without a pass. And we could make it stick. If you think about it a minute, you’ll see that you’d leave us no alternative. We can’t simply let you keep walking around in open insubordination without punishing you. All the other men would stop flying missions, too. No, you have my word for it. We will court-martial you if you turn our deal down, even though it would raise a lot of questions and be a terrible black eye for Colonel Cathcart.’ Colonel Cathcart winced at the words ‘black eye’ and, without any apparent premeditation, hurled his slender onyx-and-ivory cigarette holder down viciously on the wooden surface on his desk. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he shouted unexpectedly. ‘I hate this goddam cigarette holder!’ The cigarette holder bounced off the desk to the wall, ricocheted across the window sill to the floor and came to a stop almost where he was standing. Colonel Cathcart stared down at it with an irascible scowl. ‘I wonder if it’s really doing me any good.’
‘It’s a feather in your cap with General Peckem, but a black eye for you with General Scheisskopf,’ Colonel Korn informed him with a mischievous look of innocence.
‘Well, which one am I supposed to please?’
‘Both.’
‘How can I please them both? They hate each other. How am I ever going to get a feather in my cap from General Scheisskopf without getting a black eye from General Peckem?’
‘March.’
‘Yeah, march. That’s the only way to please him. March. March.’ Colonel Cathcart grimaced sullenly. ‘Some generals! They’re a disgrace to their uniforms. If people like those two can make general, I don’t see how I can miss.’
‘You’re going to go far.’ Colonel Korn assured him with a flat lack of conviction, and turned back chuckling to Yossarian, his disdainful merriment increasing at the sight of Yossarian’s unyielding expression of antagonism and distrust. ‘And there you have the crux of the situation. Colonel Cathcart wants to be a general and I want to be a colonel, and that’s why we have to send you home.’
‘Why does he want to be a general?’
‘Why? For the same reason that I want to be a colonel. What else have we got to do? Everyone teaches us to aspire to higher things. A general is higher than a colonel, and a colonel is higher than a lieutenant colonel. So we’re both aspiring. And you know, Yossarian, it’s a lucky thing for you that we are. Your timing on this is absolutely perfect, but I suppose you took that factor into account in your calculations.’
‘I haven’t been doing any calculating,’ Yossarian