As a student pilot flying a Piper Cub, Correspondent David Lee recalls, he was always "scaring the breath out of my instructor" and landing in "hop-it-in" style. Recently Lee, who covered the Apollo program for TIME, was back in Houston at the controls of NASA'S new, "reusable" spaceship. The old hop-it-in landing did not work when he tried to bring down the giant spaceship, and he crashed. Fortunately the flight was simulated, and Lee was not only able to walk away but also to file a report for this week's story in Science, written

by Associate Editor Peter Stoler.

Professional football scouts are keen-eyed examiners whose charts detail how far a quarterback can throw, how fast a halfback can run the 40-yd. dash, or how many pounds a lineman can bench-press. The pro scouts' assessments of this year's football players were the basis for this year's college All-America team (see SPORT). In their reports, the scouts often single out talented yet unpublicized college players who go on to stardom in the N.F.L. One of TIME'S 1971 choices, for example, was an obscure University of Michigan guard,

Reggie McKenzie, now an offensive lineman with Buffalo. McKenzie is part of the front four who are known as the "Electric Company" because they turn on "the Juice." The Juice, of course, is O.J. Simpson, who was a running back on TIME'S 1968 team.

For three weeks TIME London Correspondent Lawrence Malkin was forced to circle warily around master Movie Maker Stanley Kubrick, whose aversion to journalists is well known. So Malkin began his reporting for this week's cover story by talking to members of the technical crew and cast of Kubrick's latest epic film, Barry Lyndon. In Los Angeles, meanwhile, Correspondent Leo Janos learned more about Kubrick's style during interviews with Ryan O'Neal, who had kept a diary throughout the shooting of the movie. In New York, Senior Editor Martha Duffy and

Contributor Richard Schickel, who wrote the story, carefully studied the correspondents' reports and other material on Kubrick. When Kubrick finally did concede to an interview, Schickel flew to London where the two had a four-hour middle-of-the-night conversation in a fog-shrouded studio at nearby Elstree. Schickel found him "tirelessly intelligent, extremely responsive and straightforward, and not at all elusive intellectually."

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