The strange saga of Patricia Hearst has created an uncommonly tough, unpredictable assignment for San Francisco Bureau Chief Joseph Boyce and Correspondent John Austin. Boyce, who joined TIME in 1970 after four years as a reporter with the Chicago Tribune, says that the story "has been the most difficult one to cover in my eight years in journalism." Austin, who has covered Capitol Hill and President Nixon's 1968 campaign for TIME, concurs.

Before news of the abduction was made public, the bureau received a tip that the daughter of William Randolph Hearst, not Randolph A. Hearst, had been kidnaped. "It has been like that," says Austin. "Tips that get twisted. Rumors with kernels of truth. Outright lies." How, then, to get the story? "It's like being a fireman," says Boyce. "You answer every alarm though you know it may be false. You continue to dig, check and crosscheck, and try to put the pieces together."

Adds Austin: "You have to come to grips with knocking on doors and waiting for 'meets' with people you don't know but who say they have some information about the 'Symbionese Liberation Army.' With the violent nature of the S.L.A. always in the back of your mind, you can come up with some pretty melodramatic thoughts."

For eleven weeks the work has been unrelenting. Boyce and Austin work from Monday through Saturday--fielding queries for other TIME stories all the while --and on Sundays one of them monitors a radio at all times for late news breaks. Helping them are Correspondent Patricia Delaney and Reporter-Researcher Anne Constable, and Stringers Paul Ciotti, Glenn Garvin and Gail Kennard. By questioning witnesses to last week's bank robbery, the team produced a thorough account of it. They also got exclusive interviews with members of the Hearst family last week. Boyce won the confidence of Linguistics Instructor Colston Westbrook, the former S.L.A. intimate who is now in hiding, and learned from him about the organization's early history. Boyce, in fact, recently arranged a phone conversation between Westbrook, then under cover on the East Coast, and a man eager to talk with him--Randolph A. Hearst.

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