 Why is everyone surprised that Thaddeus was able to make a bomb?
Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere complex of buildings that housed the main wards. As he finished each piece, he carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay. The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the patient ignored the question. "You've been coming along famously and you must remember to answer when someone talks to you. Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place. "Atom bomb." I thought you said an 'atom bomb.'" At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit of clay and slapped it into place. The sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light burning in each ward office. At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward. An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild screams of the frightened and demented patients. Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been the arts and crafts building. Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed with a small, secret smile on his lips. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight. 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. "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.
 It was only made of clay and nothing else
 He needed the finger paints but Mr. Lieberman had taken those  Miss Abercrombie had taken away the other parts that would have made it work  It was only made of clay and nothing else  It was the wrong kind of clay to build an explosive device from