No longer will Subscriber Charles Brown Jr. have to wait three to four months to find out how the war is going and what is happening here at home.

Mr. Brown is TIME'S only subscriber on Raiatea, a high green island just 120 miles 'northwest of Tahiti, and ever since Pearl Harbor he has been getting anywhere from 12 to 16 issues of our Overseas Edition the same day--by steamer from San Francisco to Tahiti, by little inter-island schooner from Tahiti to Raiatea. And when the mail comes in ...

"I promptly notify my brown-and white-and yellow-skinned acquaintances along Uturoa beach that until further notice it is taboo for them to see me--unless they want red sparks to fly from my eyes.

"In my bird-cage home of plaited bamboo and braided palm-fronds on the weatherside beach of a coral lagoon, I commence reading--and on I read from the red hour of sunrise to hot, windless midday, through a breeze-freshened afternoon to a rose and lilac sunset, into the brief purple twilight and, lamp flame at full height, right up to when the Southern Cross is directly overhead at midnight. Day after day, night after night--the schedule never varies.

"Then, on the fifteenth day, I dispatch several messages. And shortly thereafter my amiable brown-and white-and yellow-skinned acquaintances come up through the garden to the bird-cage house. With quiet, impassive faces they inquire about the condition of Mrs. Civilization. . . ."

This week I have good news for Subscriber Brown and his friends on Raiatea--and for nearly 3,800 other TIME readers on the other side of the world. For this week subscribers all over the South Pacific--in Australia, New Zealand and Samoa, the Tonga and the Society and the Friendly Islands, New Guinea, New Hebrides and New Caledonia--will start getting our Pacific Edition by air from Honolulu, instead of our Overseas Edition by ship all the way from San Francisco.

Of course, TIME has been publishing a special edition in Australia for more than two years now--and we began printing a special edition in Manila even before the heart of the city was retaken. But all these copies are earmarked for General MacArthur's men--and since there is no regular ship service from Hawaii to the South Pacific, the only way to get Honolulu copies to civilian readers there was to send them south by plane.

Naturally TIME feels a very real obligation to deliver the news to its readers the quickest possible way, wherever these readers may be--and every week now these far-away Pacific subscribers should have TIME while you are still reading that same issue here at home.

In addition to flying TIME south from Honolulu we have also just launched a new Northern Air Express Edition to fly TIME north from Seattle to Alaska--to get copies to subscribers in that territory and across the border in Canada's Yukon by Friday or Saturday, a week to ten days earlier than ever before.

And perhaps I should round out this report with still another piece of distribution news: Now that Finland has declared war on Germany more than 4,000 English-reading Finns are buying TIME'S Stockholm-printed edition each week for a true report on what is going on all over the world.

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