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.