and the bursting crash of a thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild screams of the frightened and demented patients.
It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.
Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been the arts and crafts building.
Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the explosion.
None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.
The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.
Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.
At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.
At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast crater.
In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.
“It’s impossible and unbelievable,” Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater. “How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?”
“It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel,” one of the haggard AEC men offered timidly. “Not over three kilotons.”
“I don’t care if it was the size of a peanut,” Thurgood screamed. “How did it get here?”
A military intelligence agent spoke up. “If we knew, sir, we wouldn’t be standing around here. We don’t know, but the fact remains that it WAS an atomic explosion.”
Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.
“Let’s go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything that was in that building?” Thurgood swept his hand in the general direction of the blast crater.
“Colonel, I’ve told you a dozen times,” the hospital administrator said with exasperation, “this was our manual therapy room. We gave our patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems, through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman.”
“All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,” Thurgood sighed. “I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this morning blew it to hell and gone.
“And I’ve got to find out how it happened.”
Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little doctor.
“Where’s that girl you said was in charge of this place?”
“We’ve already called for Miss Abercrombie and she’s on her way here now,” the doctor snapped.
Outside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one time.
A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.
She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned expression.
“He did make an atom bomb,” she cried.
Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.
At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff room of the hospital administration building.
Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie’s chart book bounce with every beat.
“It’s ridiculous,” Thurgood roared. “We’ll all be the laughingstocks of the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You are all nuts. You’re in the right place, but count me out.”
At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists, strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered weariness.
“Miss Abercrombie,” one of the physicists spoke up gently, “you say that after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at Funston’s work?”
The therapist nodded unhappily.
“And you say that, to the best of your knowledge,” the physicist continued, “there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay.”
“I’m positive that’s all there was in it,” Miss Abercrombie cried.
There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.
“That seems to settle it, colonel. We’ve got to give this Funston another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision.”
Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.
“Are you crazy?” he screamed. “You want to get us all thrown into this filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second, anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid’s modeling clay?
“They’d crucify us, that’s what they’d do!”
At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer’s greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an officer’s cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of the runway with propellers turning.
Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into the night skies.
The plane landed the next morning at the AEC’s atomic testing grounds in the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and military men huddled around a small wooden table.
There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary Miss Abercrombie.
“Now you’re positive this is just about the same amount and the same kind of clay he used before?”
“I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the hospital,” she replied, “and it’s the same amount.”
Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.
She smiled at Funston.
“Now isn’t this nice, Mr. Funston,” she said. “These nice men have brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the one you made for me yesterday.”
A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus’ face. He looked around the shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation’s top atomic scientists watched in fascination.
