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.