WHILE the explosion of the summit conference last week affected the lives of a lot of people all around the world, few felt the sudden turn of events more directly than TIME Associate Editor Robert C. Christopher. Ten hours before the bulletins began to clang out of Paris about Nikita Khrushchev's torpedoing of the conference, Writer Christopher had put the finishing touches on a cover story about the summit. When the blowup came, he had to pull his story apart and put it together again to assess and analyze the new situation, all under taut deadline pressure. Thirty-six hours later he was at work on a new cover story--this week's on Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Y. Malinovsky.

Writing cover stories is not new to Bob Christopher; this is his 25th since he came to TIME in 1950. Nor is English his only language. He studied French and Japanese at Yale, achieved a facility in Japanese during World War II as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in the Pacific. Called back into the Army in the Korean war, he soon acquired a reading knowledge of Chinese. Later, as a correspondent in TIME'S Rome bureau, he picked up Italian.

AT 36, Writer Christopher does most of his reading and writing in English. At one time he used to speed through eight to ten books a week, but now, with a family--he and his wife June have three children, aged 3 to 7--he gets through only four books a week. Last week TIME'S correspondents working on the cover story completely usurped Christopher's spare reading time--in four days bombarded him with some 70,000 words from Berlin, Bonn, London, Paris and Washington.

Among the correspondents reporting to Christopher was the Paris bureau's Godfrey Blunden, who reached into the past to provide invaluable material for the story. In 1943, at the Russian village of Tchlymskaia, Blunden met Malinovsky just as the Russian officer was completing the southern arc of the historic encirclement of German forces outside Stalingrad. Last week Blunden dug up the 17-year-old notes of his interview with Malinovsky, put them on the wire to New York. At the same time, Moscow Bureau Chief Edmund Stevens, who is fluent in Russian, was forwarding personal translations of the Soviets' words-- which, rough as they sounded in their own interpreters' translations, were at times rougher still in the original. Stevens' skill was particularly helpful on words like ublindki--used by Khrushchev to describe the West Germans--which could mean "abortions" or "Mongolian idiots" or other terms far worse than some other translators used.

Back in New York, assessing TIME correspondents' files plus a wealth of other background material from all over the world, Bob Christopher wrapped up what he hoped was his last cover-writing task at least for a few weeks. But three in a row would be a record, and who could tell what would happen next week?

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