Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them.
If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.
Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
‘That’s some catch, that Catch-22,’ he observed.
‘It’s the best there is,’ Doc Daneeka agreed.
Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness.
There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn’t quite sure that he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art or about the flies Orr saw in Appleby’s eyes.
He had Orr’s word to take for the flies in Appleby’s eyes.
‘Oh, they’re there, all right,’ Orr had assured him about the flies in Appleby’s eyes after Yossarian’s fist fight with Appleby in the officers’ club, ‘although he probably doesn’t even know it.
That’s why he can’t see things as they really are.’
‘How come he doesn’t know it?’ inquired Yossarian.
‘Because he’s got flies in his eyes,’ Orr explained with exaggerated patience.
‘How can he see he’s got flies in his eyes if he’s got flies in his eyes?’
It made as much sense as anything else, and Yossarian was willing to give Orr the benefit of the doubt because Orr was from the wilderness outside New York City and knew so much more about wildlife than Yossarian did, and because Orr, unlike Yossarian’s mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, in-law, teacher, spiritual leader, legislator, neighbor and newspaper, had never lied to him about anything crucial before.
Yossarian had mulled his newfound knowledge about Appleby over in private for a day or two and then decided, as a good deed, to pass the word along to Appleby himself.
‘Appleby, you’ve got flies in your eyes,’ he whispered helpfully as they passed by each other in the doorway of the parachute tent on the day of the weekly milk run to Parma.
‘What?’ Appleby responded sharply, thrown into confusion by the fact that Yossarian had spoken to him at all.
‘You’ve got flies in your eyes,’ Yossarian repeated.
‘That’s probably why you can’t see them.’
Appleby retreated from Yossarian with a look of loathing bewilderment and sulked in silence until he was in the jeep with Havermeyer riding down the long, straight road to the briefing room, where Major Danby, the fidgeting group operations officer, was waiting to conduct the preliminary briefing with all the lead pilots, bombardiers and navigators.
Appleby spoke in a soft voice so that he would not be heard by the driver or by Captain Black, who was stretched out with his eyes closed in the front seat of the jeep.
‘Havermeyer,’ he asked hesitantly. ‘Have I got flies in my eyes?’
Havermeyer blinked quizzically.
‘Sties?’ he asked.
‘No, flies,’ he was told.
Havermeyer blinked again.
‘Flies?’
‘In my eyes.’
‘You must be crazy,’ Havermeyer said.
‘No, I’m not crazy.
Yossarian’s crazy.
Just tell me if I’ve got flies in my eyes or not.
Go ahead. I can take it.’
Havermeyer popped another piece of peanut brittle into his mouth and peered very closely into Appleby’s eyes.
‘I don’t see any,’ he announced.
Appleby heaved an immense sigh of relief.
Havermeyer had tiny bits of peanut brittle adhering to his lips, chin and cheeks.
‘You’ve got peanut brittle crumbs on your face,’ Appleby remarked to him.
‘I’d rather have peanut brittle crumbs on my face than flies in my eyes,’ Havermeyer retorted.
The officers of the other five planes in each flight arrived in trucks for the general briefing that took place thirty minutes later.
The three enlisted men in each crew were not briefed at all, but were carried directly out on the airfield to the separate planes in which they were scheduled to fly that day, where they waited around with the ground crew until the officers with whom they had been scheduled to fly swung off the rattling tailgates of the trucks delivering them and it was time to climb aboard and start up.
Engines rolled over disgruntedly on lollipop-shaped hardstands, resisting first, then idling smoothly awhile, and then the planes lumbered around and nosed forward lamely over the pebbled ground like sightless, stupid, crippled things until they taxied into the line at the foot of the landing strip and took off swiftly, one behind the other, in a zooming, rising roar, banking slowly into formation over mottled treetops, and circling the field at even speed until all the flights of six had been formed and then setting course over cerulean water on the first leg of the journey to the target in northern Italy or France.
The planes gained altitude steadily and were above nine thousand feet by the time they crossed into enemy territory.
One of the surprising things always was the sense of calm and utter silence, broken only by the test rounds fired from the machine guns, by an occasional toneless, terse remark over the intercom, and, at last, by the sobering pronouncement of the bombardier in each plane that they were at the I.P. and about to turn toward the target.
There was always sunshine, always a tiny sticking in the throat from the rarefied air.
The B-25s they flew in were stable, dependable, dull-green ships with twin rudders and engines and wide wings.
Their single fault, from where Yossarian sat as a bombardier, was the tight crawlway separating the bombardier’s compartment in the plexiglass nose from the nearest escape hatch.
The crawlway was a narrow, square, cold tunnel hollowed out beneath the flight controls, and a large man like Yossarian could squeeze through only with difficulty.
A chubby, moon-faced navigator with little reptilian eyes and a pipe like Aarfy’s had trouble, too, and Yossarian used to chase him back from the nose as they turned toward the target, now minutes away.
There was a time of tension then, a time of waiting with nothing to hear and nothing to see and nothing to do but wait as the antiaircraft guns below took aim and made ready to knock them all sprawling into infinite sleep if they could.