If you worked for TIME in Russia, could your wife (with no notice until this moment) wind up all her affairs here and be off to join you on a ship sailing within 36 hours?

Add to this: a 13-year-old son to go with her, a country house to close and a town apartment to rent, an incomplete visa, no travelers' checks, nothing packed for a trip of any kind. And once-she-gets off the boat, her route will lie 900 miles across two war-ravaged nations.

More and more TIME wives will face problems like this as peace makes it possible for them to join their husbands overseas--so you might like to know more about what Mrs. Craig Thompson and TIME'S travel-fixer. Jack Manthorp, found themselves up against the other day.

Wife of TIME'S Moscow Bureau Chief, Edith Thompson has been waiting for months to join her husband. It looked as if her sailing date would not come for many months more, for the few Russian ships on the U.S.Russia run do not carry ordinary U.S. passengers, while the American ships are mostly freighters with no accommodations for women and children.

So (until Wednesday a week ago) Mrs. Thompson and Craig Jr. were feeling pretty foresighted about already having had their inoculations and many weeks of Russian-language study from phonograph records. Then at noon Wednesday their several months' grace disappeared in two minutes flat: the phone rang and an official voice told the Thompsons they could have space on the Warren Delano, bound for Constanta in Rumania--if they could report with their baggage and their papers the very next day! (Rumania isn't Russia, but this was the best offer yet, so Mrs. Thompson said okay.)

But the steamship company couldn't take Mrs. Thompson unless her visa said "To Constanta." And the Russian Consulate couldn't change the visa because Moscow had specifically named Odessa as her port of entry. Finally, after much bilingual ping-pong, the steamship company accepted a note from the Russian Consulate recommending that Mrs. Thompson travel to Odessa "via Constanta."

Then the Customs House got interested; it seems she was taking some clothes to her husband's Russian secretary. And at the last minute the parade for General Wainwright almost kept her from getting to the pier. (But through it all young Craig beamed: at last, after talking about it for months, he'd been able to tell his schoolmates, "I'm going to Russia tomorrow.")

And so the Thompsons are settling down in Moscow en famille--among the first of many TIME families to take up permanent residence in countries far from the U.S.

For the days when keeping ahead of the news kept most of our TIME

men jumping and jeeping from front to front are now almost over. And the need today is more than ever for reporters-in-residence--for journalists with an intimate, personal understanding of places and peoples and changes working under the surface. To help the editors write into TIME not just diplomatic facts, but the feel of a whole new civilization. Craig Thompson, his family with him, hopes to live among the Russians for years.

And as conditions permit, other TIME wives (long separated from their husbands as war-wives everywhere have been) will take off for other reunions --to make their homes and bring up their children in news capitals all around the world.

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