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.