Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
That the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized have finished." The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints. other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites, lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers' prospects for the pennant. 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. The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word of advice here, and a suggestion there. She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay. "And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?" Miss Abercrombie asked. The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply. "Atom bomb." A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. "Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I thought you said an 'atom bomb.'" "Did," Funston murmured. Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each patient. At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients' mess hall. 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. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room. shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward. screams of the frightened and demented patients. with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily. 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 patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems, 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 "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 Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little doctor. Outside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one time. expression. Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the 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 after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at "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 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 Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to 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. modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary "Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same hospital," she replied, "and it's the same amount." Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with 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 The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of 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. the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon. In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his 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. 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 In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama THE END

<question>:
Which group of people shares the most similarities with the group of patients in the mental institution, as they are described by the author?

<options>:
A A circus troupe
B A disorderly mob
C An artists' collective
D A Kindergarten class

<answer>:

D