He doesn't do it very often, but he finds it comes in handy when he is traveling.

You know, you sit down next to someone on the airplane or on a bus or while waiting for the light rail and they give you their instant life history, including, of course, their current medical history.

And then they say, "You know, Doc, I have this peculiar pain in my left shoulder. What do you think it is? And what should I do about it?"

It isn't even socialized medicine, it's a plea for free.

So my friend, when asked the $640 question (or whatever the bill for an office visit might be) about what he does for a living, says, "Oh, I raise cattle. Got a spread near Moose Jaw, Alberta—500 head or so."

This is pretty sure cover because there aren't many cattle raisers from Canada traveling the U.S. these days, no one is quite sure where Moose Jaw might be and raising cattle is not a topic of conversation which leads to much discussion.

This isn't my friend's only cover story, of course. He's been an electrician, a garbage contractor, a consultant in chip production, a whistle manufacturer and a variety of other occupations.

Using a cover if you're a doctor can be a dangerous business, though, almost as dangerous as being a CIA operative. Now and then there is a medical emergency on the plane, the flight attendants ask, "Is there a doctor on board?" and my friend has, like Superman, to shed his ordinary business as a cattle rancher or a lifeguard or a chicken inspector and reveal his true identity—the Hippocratic Oath and all that sort of thing.

But deep cover, if we can put it that way, saves a lot of instant diagnoses at cocktail parties and social gatherings, provided there aren't a lot of people who don't already know who you are.

I have thought a lot about my friend's assumption of a new identity to fit the social occasion. There are times when I wouldn't mind trying it myself. Invariably, when strangers at a party discover you're a newspaper person, they exclaim, "Oh, that sounds so interesting. I bet you meet a lot of fascinating people."

Like, for instance, themselves.

As a matter of fact, most newspaper people are pretty ordinary and they spend most of their time with ordinary, even dull, people and they don't have fascinating stories to tell about the time they interviewed Marilyn Monroe or talked to Haile Selassie. They would (or at least I would) sometimes prefer to remain anonymous.

How many of them may have thought of cover stories and other identities is something I have not investigated.

But I have my cover story pretty well worked out. I'm pretending that I have a spread of rabbits (50,000 head or so) on a ranch near Two Gun, Ariz., which is just over the hill from the Tonto Basin near Snowflake.

(As it happens these are real places. I looked at an Arizona road map to be certain.)

"Big problem," I say, knowingly, "is keeping them in bounds. They can hop pretty high. So we have 20 miles of 10-foot fence. Herd them on motorcycles. They're fast critters, you know. Put birth control pills in their pellets to keep a handle on reproduction ... "

And so on.

I'm banking on the fact that there can't be many rabbit raisers traveling these days, that if there are they don't live in Arizona and that not many people know where the Tonto Basin is (or is it the Tonto Rim?).

Maybe I'd better look that up before I use the cover. Maybe I should be a buffalo-chip maker. No, not that kind of buffalo chip. These are kind of chocolate chip cookies. "Got a factory in Big Fork, Montana ... "