A Separate War and Other Stories by Joe Haldeman Page B

what you see. Then our other portable camera, like this one, will show it.”
    â€œOkay. Just point the paper north on Sixth. Or turn it around a couple of times.”
    He left with a teenage boy. “Kind of stupid,” I said. “He could have left a note behind. He could have told me hours ago what he was going to write.”
    The cameraman smiled. “You don’t know television, ma’am. People trust the camera.”
    â€œThey do,” Jeremiah said. “Not like they read books anymore.” I could hear a woman reading the news to the camera in the next room.
    After a few minutes, John Buford Marshall smoothed his tie and another man came in to operate the camera. Bright lights snapped on. “Ma’am?” I went up to join him, and a woman powdered us both. While she was doing it, he said, “Let me have an oblique two-shot here with space in the lower corner for Randall’s insert.”
    â€œYou got it, boss.” Maybe he was the boss. After a minute, the man in the shadows said, “In five.” Three green lights, an orange and then a red.
    â€œThank you, Thelma,” he said, and conspicuously looked at his watch, in spite of the fact that there were clocks everywhere. “Thank you for the explanation of this ordinary woman’s extraordinary talent. Do you see our reporter, Mrs. Hockfield?”
    â€œOh, yes. He’s standing on the sidewalk outside the music store on University. He’s talking to the cameraman.” I held the plastic close. “Can’t quite hear. Still a lot of traffic.”
    â€œHe should start writing…now.” He did, a moment later, and then turned the board around. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
    â€œJust tell us what you think it says.”
    â€œNo ‘think’ about it. It says SHE IS A THETAN.”
    Jeremiah Phipps said a word I don’t think they allow on television.
    â€œTen seconds now, and the external camera.” I was watching his face instead of the monitor. His eyes bugged out in a most gratifying way. “How…how did you…what’s a Thetan?”
    â€œI’m sure I don’t know. I’m certainly not one! I’m a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.”
    â€œHere come the phones,” Jeremiah Phipps said. One in the main office rang stridently. Two in the studio blinked angry red lights. “I think you’re going to find out more than you ever wanted to know about Thetans.”
    Â 
    It was kind of a joke. It turned out that Jeremiah Phipps knew Randall through science fiction—he was a “fan,” not a writer, and Randall decided to play a little science-fictional joke on Phipps.
    Over the next few days I heard a lot about Thetans and L. Ron Hubbard, another science-fiction writer who discovered this religion, or made it up, Dianetics or Scientology. After news of the message “SHE IS A THETAN” got around—especially after the networks picked it up—I had twenty or thirty Scientologists a day come by the office.
    As I say, you have to be a people person in this business, and part of that is to live and let live when it comes to religion. In my heart of hearts I don’t suppose I really believe any of it, not even the Episcopalianism I grew up with—that dried up when my husband died young—but anything that gets you through the day is all right by me. These Scientologists had some pretty strange things to say, and I don’t pretend I could follow it all, but they seemed moral and good-hearted.
    And they believed me. I couldn’t get any scientists past the Thetan thing, but that was all right. The Scientologists believed me. And they bought houses. Boy, did they buy houses. I got gold pins for most property sold every year from 1967 until I retired in 1981. Houses weren’t that easy to sell in Gainesville then, in the middle of the state, equally far from the ocean