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"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 & 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.
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