They were near the platform of a train station overlooking narrow-gauge railroad tracks of a type Yossarian felt certain he had seen before. The reduced span of the tunnels ensured a train of small size, something on the scale of a miniature amusement ride.
"Here comes another one," called out McBride. "Let's sec what's there this time."
He moved closer to observe more quickly as a bright-red small locomotive pulled into sight at moderate speed with a signal bell clanging. It was running on electricity but flaunted a scarlet smokestack with designs in polished brass. Working the clapper of the bell with a piece of clothesline fixed to his control levers was a grinning engineer of middle age, uniformed in a red jacket with a circular MASSPOB shoulder patch. The little train went rolling on by, bringing smoothly in tow some open-topped, narrow passenger cars with people on board sitting two abreast! Again Yossarian could not believe his eyes. McBride pointed in frantic excitement at the two figures sitting in the first seat of the first car.
"Hey, I know those people! Who are they again?"
"Fiorello H. La Guardia and Franklin Delano Roosevelt," Yossarian answered, and said absolutely nothing about the two elderly couples who sat with his older brother in the seats in back of them.
In the next carriage he recognized John F. Kennedy with his wife alongside, behind the former governor of Texas and his wife who had been in the death car with him.
And by himself on a seat in the car that followed those immortals rode Noodles Cook, looking haggard, disoriented, and half dead in front of two government officials Yossarian remembered from news reports. One was fat and one was skinny, and seated side by side behind them in the last seat of this third of three cars were C. Porter Lovejoy and Milo Minderbinder. Lovejoy was talking, counting on his fingers. Both were alive, and Milo was smiling too.
"I could have sworn," said Yossarian, "that Milo had been left behind."
Gaffney formed with his mouth the one word "Never."
It was then that Yossarian decided to keep his date with Melissa. He did not want to remain down there with Strangelove and those others. Gaffney was shocked and thought he was mad. It was not in the cards.
"Oh, no, no, Yo-Yo." Gaffney was shaking his head. "You can't go out. It makes no sense now. You won't go."
"Gaffney, I am going. You're wrong again."
"But you won't get far. You won't last long."
"We'll see. I'll try."
"You'll have to be careful. There's danger outside."
"There's danger in here. Anyone coming?"
McBride, as though waiting, jumped forward and joined him. "You'd never find your way out without me." At Yossarian's side, he confessed, "I'm worried about Joan out there alone."
Gaffney would wait until he knew much more. "I know enough now not to take chances."
Michael too did not like taking chances, and Yossarian did not blame him for that one either.
Bob and Raul had too much intelligence to put themselves at risk when they did not have to, and could worry about their families just as well from down there.
As he saw Yossarian riding up away from him on the escalato to the elevator to keep a lunch date with his pregnant girlfriend, Michael, who'd been both proud and embarrassed by his father's love affair, had the listless, desolate feeling that one of them was dying, maybe both.
Yossarian, striding anxiously up the escalator to hurry back outside as fast as he could get there, was stimulated joyously by a resurrection of optimism more native to Melissa than himself the innate-and inane-conviction that nothing harmful could happen to him, that nothing bad could happen to a just man. This was nonsense, he knew; but he also knew, in his gut, he'd be as safe as she was, and had no doubt then that all three of them, he, Melissa, and the new baby, would survive, flourish, and live happily-forever after.
"Häagen-Dazs."
"What was that about?" the aviator Kid Sampson asked, from the back compartment of the invisible and noiseless sub-super sonic attack bomber.
"Was your father a shoemaker?" answered the pilot McWatt "Are you the son of a barber?"
"I can't sew either."
"Then we have to go on. It's another mission for us."
"Where to?"
"I've forgotten. But inertia will guide us. Our inertial guidance system will always take us."
"McWatt?"
"Sampson?"
"How long have we been together now? Two years, three?"
"It feels more like fifty. Sampson, you know what I regret? That we never talked more to each other."
"We never got more to talk about, did we?"
"What's that down there? A missile?"
"Let me see on my radar." Crossing below them on a course almost perpendicular were four parallel contrails gliding out from jet engines as though extruded in chalk. "It's an airliner, McWatt. A, passenger plane on the way to Australia."
"I wonder how those passengers would feel if they knew we were up here on this mission again amp; ghost riders in the sky."
"McWatt?"
"Sampson?"
"Do we really have to go in again?"
"I guess we have to, don't we?"
"Do we?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah. I think we have to."
"Oh, well. What the hell."
Sam Singer had no illusions. Unlike Yossarian, he had no hopes of finding romance and falling in love again with somebody new. Succumbing unresistingly to the harsh necessity of living alone, to which he had been presented with no agreeable alternative, he had not been shattered by the merciless deprivations. He had discussed this; future with Glenda, who, despite her terminal condition, worried more about his solitary years ahead than he had been able to do.
He saw friends, read more, watched television news. He had New York. He went to plays and movies, occasionally to opera, used to always have engaging classical music on one of the FM radio stations, played bridge one or two evenings most weeks in neighborly communal groups of people largely like himself who weite mostly even-tempered and congenial. Each time he listened to Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony he was filled with awe and amazed. He had his volunteer work with the cancer relief agency. He had his few female friends. He drank no more than before. He learned quickly to eat by himself, carry-out dishes at home, lunches and dinners in neighborhood coffee shops and small restaurants, meals that were not feasts, reading too at a table alone, his book or magazine or his second newspaper of the day. Occasionally, he played pinochle with others left over from Coney Island. He still was not good. He went out evenings about as often as he wished to.
He was greatly pleased so far on his trip around the world, greatly surprised by his feeling of well-being and his large amounts of satisfaction. It was good again to be out of his apartment. In Atlanta and Houston with his daughters and their husbands and children he had at last reached a stage at which he found himself sated with their company before any of them showed signs of growing restless with his. He must be feeling his age, he offered in apology early each evening, before departing for the night. He insisted always on staying in nearby hotels. In Los Angeles he was still in lifelong harmony with Winkler and his wife. They all three tired in perfect coordination. He had a few good dates with his nephew and his family and was genuinely charmed by the precocious brightness and beauty of the children. But between himself and all the young adults with whom he found himself, he had to concede that more than a generation gap divided them.
Once outside New York, he was thankful he had taken his cassette player and tapes and some books of solid content that demanded studious involvement.
In Hawaii he sunned himself in daytime and finished rereading Middlemarch. Knowing better what to expect, he was able to appreciate it richly. In his two evenings there he had dinner with the former wife of his old friend and her present husband, and with the woman, now single, he'd worked with at Time magazine, with whom Glenda had been acquainted too. Had she invited him home to spend the night with her, he would have certainly consented. But she did not seem to know that. Lew or Yossarian would have managed it better.