aze of clay strips grew and as Funston
finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense
silence.

"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow." She
looked at the men and nodded her head.

The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of
clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him
from the shack.

There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The
experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere
and cameras clicking.

For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay
and photographed it from every angle.

Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down
range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of
stony-faced military policemen.

"I told you this whole thing was asinine," Thurgood snarled as the
scientific teams trooped into the bunker.

Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open
door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden
cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.

A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit
the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door
slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.

* * * * *

Six hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait
jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.
Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the
Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.

In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were
closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his
baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted
across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in
a neatly-tied bundle.

In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling
glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.

"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel," the general
said coldly, "but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane
asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit
there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic
devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them."

The general pause