THE lacy pattern of little round balls in the background of this week's cover is from a deoxyribo-nucleic-acid molecule model built at Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute. The grey balls represent carbon atoms; blue is phosphorous; yellow is nitrogen; red is oxygen; white is hydrogen. Molecules do not look like this, of course. The atoms in them are much too small to be seen, even with an electron microscope. The pattern shown is a small part, somewhat simplified, of the DNA molecule, which geneticists now believe is the carrier of heredity and the chemical master of all life. If all of this seems to bring up some questions about the unfolding mysteries of heredity, see SCIENCE, The Secret of Life.

THE first newsmen to slip through the lines last week and reach the Cuban mountains where 42 U.S. and Canadian citizens are held captive by Fidel Castro's rebels were a party from TIME and LIFE. At first the rebels met the newsmen with leveled guns, but later they led TIME Correspondent Jay Mallin to the hostages and even gave him peg-cuffed zoot trousers to replace his mud-caked pants. Back in the city of Guantanamo, he stared into gun barrels again--this time with suspicious government soldiers behind them. Before he talked his way past the soldiers and into the U.S. naval base eight miles away, Mallin picked up a Cuban fashion note. "The sack dress is outlawed in Guantanamo," he said. "The girls might carry guns underneath." For his eyewitness report, see HEMISPHERE. Caught in a War.

BOB SCHULMAN, TIME'S Seattle Bureau Chief, was treading the trails and villages of Alaska again last week when the word came through that the U.S. Senate had voted statehood for the territory. The news was as cheering for Schulman as it was for most Alaskans, for both he and Seattle Correspondent Russ Sackett had spent weeks in the territory when the bill was in the House, reporting the cover story on Governor Mike Stepovich (TIME, June 9), and both had acquired a glow of personal discovery for the "land of beauty and swat." Schulman blushed a modest red when enthusiastic Alaskans told him that TIME'S cover had stirred enough general interest to help give the statehood bill its final push through the Senate. For a report on the final steps to statehood, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS, The 49th State.

SALESMEN for Chicago's Hubbell Metals Inc. sometimes answer the telephone and hear a cannon go off. It is their president's way of saluting them for making a particularly good sale, urging them on to greater success. Other firms are giving the kids whistles and the wives signs intended to get Pop out to sell, sell, sell. The story of the wonderful (and woeful) things that are happening to salesmen as businessmen attack the recession is told in BUSINESS, Spur for the Front Lines.

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