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 t