Journalists, as everyone knows, are compulsive (and sometimes compelled) travelers. Journeys in pursuit of stories often produce separate excursions backward in time, flights of nostalgia and memory that help a skilled observer feel his way into the subject he is covering.

This week's cover story on the new Panama Canal agreement engaged TIME Correspondents Jerry Hannifin and Bernard Diederich in the past as well as the present. Diederich, our Mexico City bureau chief since 1969 and the winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for Latin American reporting, has been following the canal situation for seven years. Yet as he reported this week, his reflections went back 35 years to the time when, as a boy in a U.S. Merchant Marine T-2 tanker, he first traveled the waterway. The canal, he notes, was then bustling with wartime traffic, and the city of Colon flourished as one of the fleshpots of the Latin world. Today it is a depressed town. Reaching even further back, New Zealander Diederich remembers stories told of his wife's Haitian grandfather, who worked on the construction of the canal.

Jerry Hannifin, who flew to Panama for an interview with Strongman Omar Torrijos Herrera, is also an old hemisphere hand. Says he of the canal: "In its time, it was the engineering equivalent of the U.S. landing men on the moon."

Our Science story on the flight of the sky shuttle Enterprise was reported by Houston Correspondent George Taber and written by Associate Editor Peter Stoler, who journeyed to Edwards Air Force Base to get the feel of the place and plan the coverage. In New York, it was checked by Senior Reporter-Researcher Sydnor Vanderschmidt. Watching Enterprise 's touchdown on TV, Researcher Vanderschmidt experienced a special kind of journalist's empathy. She is a sailplane pilot herself.

TIME Associate Editor Frederic Golden has just written a book, Colonies in Space (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $8.95), dealing with the next step the success of the Enterprise may lead to. Golden predicts the first space colony by the year 2001. An odd date, that: just one year after the new treaty gives Panama control of the canal.

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