Our correspondents are noted for their prodigious outlay of energy--but little of it is ever wasted. When TIME's editors decided that the national energy problem was too pressing for us to wait for Jimmy Carter's new energy program, promised for April 20, they gave Washington Correspondent Don Sider the task of finding out in advance the details of the emerging program. Naturally, Sider went to see Presidential Assistant James Schlesinger, the subject of this week's cover. Just as naturally, Mr. Energy was not about to hand over the blueprint of a policy he was just then building. Though he gave Sider several hours of his time and was, says Sider, "patient, courteous, open and helpful," Schlesinger, like his aides, declined to reveal any details.

That kind of rebuff is familiar to journalists, and Sider was not fazed. "Ninety percent of reporting is like 90% of a detective's work," he says. "You have to hustle around gathering fragments of information from as many sources as possible, and then fit them together into a logical pattern." So Sider set off across Washington, hunting down and questioning more than 50 people with a stake in the new energy program: Congressmen, Capitol Hill aides, industry executives, environmentalists, public interest lawyers and others. Then, after huddling with fellow Correspondent John Berry, another energy expert, he wired his findings to Associate Editor David Tinnin, who wrote the cover story. Though Schlesinger and his staffers are still hard at work on final details, the result of Sider's probings is, we think, the most thorough preview yet of a program that will affect every American--and indeed the very future of the U.S.

New Delhi Correspondent Lawrence Malkin had another sort of assignment: to determine the mood of the Indian people as they prepared to vote in their national election on March 20. Traveling the subcontinent as a newcomer to the region, Malkin found "the cumulative effect of an aroused citizenry one of the most moving experiences of my life." At the end of his first two months, he sent a cable to our editors in New York saying that Prime Minister Gandhi might lose. With India again free from repression, Malkin looks forward to his new assignment with enthusiasm: "Watching another country, especially one as unpredictably human as India, emerge into a new era promises to be full of surprises."

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