RUSSIAN Novelist-Playwright Mikhail Artsybashev once offered three pieces of advice to his son Boris: "Get out of Russia, don't sponge on my reputation, and change your name." After five months of fighting the Communists with the Ukrainian army during the 1918 revolution, young Boris escaped to the Black Sea, where he boarded a ship that eventually deposited him in New York with 14-c-of Turkish money in .his pocket. He celebrated his 20th birthday on Ellis Island.

Having carried out his father's first instruction, Boris transliterated the family name, set out to make a reputation for himself in America as Boris Artzybasheff. At 61, he has made a reputation around the world as an artist who stands alone in the field of humanizing machines and mechanizing humans. He has created everything from book jackets and women's clothing to a nightclub and stage sets, designed more than 50 books, had four one-man exhibits in Paris, published a collection of his own drawings and paintings (As I See) and several children's books. Since 1941 he has drawn 192 TIME covers, including this week's.

Early in his task for this week's cover, Artzy decided that the U.S. satellites--designed to seek scientific data--must be personified with definite professional functions. Starting with a dilettantish 0-119 trying to catch a Discoverer capsule with a butterfly net, he proceeded to produce (in clockwise order): a Vanguard III with a nose, "because that satellite was sent up for micrometeorite and magnetic studies, sniffing out information in space"; a shutter-ready, lens-eyed Tiros, taking pictures of the earth's cloud cover; a svelte medicine man of an Explorer I, using "a thermometer and stethoscope, since it measures temperature and cosmic rays"; a buxom flapper of a Pioneer V, absorbing a last swift kick from its booster rocket; an Explorer VII counting cosmic rays with a Geiger counter; and a loudmouthed, loudspeaker-toting Transit iB, sending back navigational signals. All of the other satellites shown on the cover have, in Artzy's unique style, a combination of in-detail realism and way-out imagination.

All of this brings up the thought that if there are beings on other planets watching these things sent up from earth, are there Boris Artzybasheffs up there who can do as good a job of depicting the devices they are sending our way to sniff and probe at us?

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