HOW to get from here to there has been a challenge to man since his time began. Today transportation is a greater challenge than ever; more than a huge industry, it is the plexus of modern society, the maze that makes the system go--or causes it to break down. In this issue, four stories in our U.S. and WORLD BUSINESS sections look into one aspect or another of transportation--safety devices becoming standard equipment on American cars, a Soviet attempt to emulate capitalist mass production of autos, the huge freighters of the future, and a set of far-out projects reported on in The Magnificent Men in Their Whooshing Machines. These include monorails, hovercraft, aero-trains, and just about every other form of transport save the flying carpet and the broomstick--some of which are superspeed realities, others still in blueprint.

TO cover these and other stories, TIME reporters themselves were moving about in a variety of vehicles ranging from the pedestrian to the exotic. Working on the whooshing-machines story, Munich Correspondent Franz Spelman sedately surveyed an international transport show from an electronically guided monorail that circled the grounds at a majestic six miles an hour. On the same story was the Tokyo Bureau's Sungyung Chang, who went to Nagoya to have a look at a model of a new 600-m.p.h. "sonic gliding vehicle." On his way there, Chang traveled on a train that moved at a mere 125 m.p.h.

John Shaw did some conventional flying between his Hong Kong base and Bangkok, where the going was less conventional. There, his means of locomotion included a motor samlor (popular Thai vehicle made up of a pedicab body hitched to a Vespa scooter), a motorized sampan and a Bangkok banker's air-conditioned Jaguar.

Paris traffic being what it is, Correspondent Judson Gooding found the bicycle the best bet for skimming to and from interviews, far speedier than taxis or the Metro. One of his colleagues had to resort to a more elaborate approach. Since the press was not welcome at the funeral of Porfirio Rubirosa, the Paris Bureau's Robert Smith dressed in black, hired a black-capped chauffeur and a black limousine and set out to cover the story. He had no trouble. Naturally the most varied and militant types of transport were put to use by our Saigon Bureau staffers, all out on this week's coverage of Viet Nam. Their means of travel included jet, helicopter, truck, taxi, rented car, jeep, armored personnel carrier--and, of course, jungle boots.

For U.S. reporters trying to cover North Viet Nam, the most sophisticated transportation is of little use: the country is hermetically sealed off to Americans and most other Westerners. For the WORLD cover story on Ho Chi Minh, The Jungle Marxist, TIME correspondents had to use patient intelligence methods--the legwork of the mind--which consisted largely of debriefing travelers, businessmen, diplomats, refugees. One of the hard facts about the North Vietnamese enemy, of course, is how independent he is of modern transportation, tirelessly moving along the forest trails. To rescue Asia from that enemy, said TIME at the end of its first cover story on Ho Chi Minh eleven years ago, "will take power, humanity and steely nerve." As this week's cover story shows, these qualities are still very much in demand.

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