The Science Reporter

By Rod Martin

A collection of short stories by the late sci-fi author, Rod Martin. The first four deal with a science reporter and his amazing reports that turn the FBS (Federal Science Bureau) on its head.

With each successive tale, the reporter seems to be getting closer and closer to being fired for reporting on this that obviously exist but could in no way be called "scientific".

The final three stories move further from the scientific reporting into the realm of the fantastic.

Readers of his "How to Build a Starcruiser" may find these tales a humorous prequel, of sorts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Martian Publishing
• Release date: May 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476158365

Rod Martin

Dr Rod Martin, Chief Executive Officer of MERL Ltd in Hitchin, UK, is a Chartered Engineer and Chartered Scientist. He has conducted research on composites used in many applications including space, aeronautics, land transport and the petrochemical industry.

Book preview

THE SCIENCE REPORTER

By Rod Martin

MARTIAN PUBLISHING

Copyright 2012 by Martian Publishing Company

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved.

No portion of this volume may

be reproduced in any format

without the express written

permission of the copyright holder.

This is a work of fiction.

Any resemblance to persons or

organizations, living or extinct,

is entirely coincidental.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

1-If All the World Is A Stage…?

2-If the Mind is a Computer…?

3 If the Mind is a Mainframe…?

4-If the Muses Aren’t Myths…?

5-Central Casting

6-Back Door to Time

7-The Hardware Store

INTRODUCTION

My up bringing was a little different than most people I knew, though at the time I thought it was perfectly normal. I thought everyone talked to ghosts and other free-floating spirits around the house, the barn, or wherever else you happened to find them. I simply assumed everyone else did dream analysis over the breakfast table every morning. And surely, creating globes of white energy around you every night before you went to sleep was commonplace.

Apparently not.

These were the actions of people with very different viewpoints of what the universe was. Many people would have called them insane. I called them Mom and Dad.

Rod Martin was born in late December of 1928, in a smallish town in West Texas called McCamey. His parents had settled there after many years of traveling through the western United States selling cosmetics his mother made. The money had been good but the traveling life was a little too much for raising kids, so Grandmother sold her cosmetic formulas to a company in Houston and the couple had landed in McCamey.

My father was their second child. There was an accident while he was still a baby. which left him with a scar an inch-and-a-half long on his forehead. When he was about five years old, Grandfather found him standing out behind the house shaking his tiny fist at the sky and yelling something.

Both of these are mentioned in the last story in the collection, The Hardware Store.

After a tour in the Navy - when he married Mom, the Baptist Preacher's Kid - Dad went on to major in Psychology in college - to try and figure out what was wrong with him - until he realized the professor and all the other people in the Psych Department were there for that very same reason. Since it had not given them any answers, he switched his major to chemistry.

After years of field work with Humble Oil and Refining and then a lab job with El Paso Natural Gas, he picked up his family and moved from Texas to the area around Washington, D. C. He eventually worked for NASA as a systems analyst then as a Vice President of Leasco Industries, but what had brought him to the nation's capital was the Church of Scientology.

Since his venture into Psych at college had not given the returns he had anticipated, Dad had delved further into the field. Pscho-Cybernetics, The Edgar Cayce Foundation, Rosicrucians, and Dianetics. The last of these led us to the move to Washington where the only Church of Scientology was at the time.

After a few years there, after the NASA gig was over, he took us all to Europe to see the Flagship, in the Mediterranean, and then on to Saint Hill, in England, the worldwide headquarters of Scientology at that time.

Then they dragged the four sons back to the states where we landed in Los Angeles to help establishment the American Saint Hill Org. Both Mom and Dad were soon leading training courses, auditing (a Scientology processing technique), and case supervising.

Three years later, we were off again to Phoenix and Dad's first attempt at setting up a Scientology Mission of his own. Not much happened there. Phoenix already had one franchise and it seemed another was not needed, so they went to work for the franchise already established but two years later, the family moved to Flagstaff, in Northern Arizona, to finally get their own mission going.

As mission were generally centered in areas with large populations, it seemed rather an odd place to situate such an enterprise. Except that it worked quite nicely. Not only was the franchise the highest in the world (at 7200 feet above sea level) it was also the highest grossing mission on the planet per capita.

Eventually, the research he was doing, and he had been continuing this since the fifties, Dad had outpaced Scientology, as he put it, and moved beyond that.

He continued counseling using his own techniques and thought perhaps writing stories might be the better way to get the message across. He started some twenty novels and several short stories before succumbing to walking pneumonia in 1992.

So, what was he trying to do with his writing? What was it he hoped to achieve?

Fun. He believed that life was a game and it should be played knowingly. In his book, How to Build a Starcruiser, some of which is mentioned in these tales, is a chart about the game and several levels on which to play the game. But I won't tell you what it is all about, as he wanted his stories to do that.

The first four tales are about the Science Reporter. The latter three mention science reporting only in passing. The final story, The Hardware Store, is the mostly autobiographical piece in the collection.

But enough chatter, read on, and have fun!

~~~~

PART ONE

IF ALL THE WORLD IS A STAGE ...?

I didn't set out to write a short story, I'm not even an author, just a reporter. Authors are writers, reporters, well, we're more like scribes and scribblers. You probably haven't seen my by-line, I have a small readership, usually a single committee of the Federal Bureau of Sciences. Well, okay, maybe we should make that had a small readership. I'm still on the payroll as of this moment; who knows about tomorrow. I finished my assignment, submitted the report and now, after having second thoughts, decided I better tell you what happened. If I don't, you'll never hear about it, 'cause the FBS is not about to let this cat out of the bag.

Your government spends a lot of money funding a wide assortment of research projects, and well, lets face it, once a researcher gets his hands on that money they are apt to want to spend it on something other than making detailed reports to their sugar daddy, dear old Uncle Sam. The FBS is sometimes interested enough in what should have been reported to send me out to get the scoop straight from the horses mouth. I got pretty good at ferreting out results the researcher hadn't bothered to mention, or hadn't bothered to notice. There was a surprising number of the latter.

I was one of those guys who reasoned that