Read Ebook: A Filbert Is a Nut by Raphael Rick

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Ebook has 100 lines and 6021 words, and 2 pages

"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.

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 they'd do!"

At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of the runway with propellers turning.

Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into the night skies.

The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and military men huddled around a small wooden table.

There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary Miss Abercrombie.

"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same kind of clay he used before?"

"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the hospital," she replied, "and it's the same amount."

Thurgooe signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.

She smiled at Funston.

"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston," she said. "These nice men have brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the one you made for me yesterday."

A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top atomic scientists watched in fascination.

His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in front of him.

Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she glanced at her watch. The maze 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 paused.

"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships out of sponge rubber?" the general added bitingly.

In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.

In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar, the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space on a tail of flame.

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