* * * * *
"You know the one thing I really like about working for DivAg?" Troy
Braden muttered into his face-mask pickup.
Ten yards behind Troy, and following in his ski tracks, his partner
Alec Patterson paused to duck under a snow-laden spruce bough before
answering. It was snowing heavily, a cold, dry crystal snow, piling up
inch upon inch on the already deep snow pack of the Sawtooth Mountain
range. In another ten minutes they would be above the timberline and
the full force of the storm would hit them.
"Tell me, Mr. Bones," he asked as he poled easily in Troy's tracks,
"what is the one thing you really like about working for the Division
of Agriculture?"
Troy tracked around a trough of bitterbrush that bent and fought
against the deep snow. "It's so dependable," he said, "so reliable, so
unchanging. In nearly two centuries, the world has left behind the
steel age; has advanced to nucleonics, tissue regeneration,
autoservice bars and electronically driven yo-yos. Everyone in the
world except the United States Division of Agriculture. The tried and
true method is the rock up on which our integrity stands--even though
it was tried more than a hundred years ago."
He dropped out of sight over a small hummock and whipped down the side
of a slight depression in the slope, his skis whispering over the dry
snow and sending up a churning crest of white from their tips.
Alec chuckled and poled after him into the basin. The two young junior
hydrologists worked their way up the opposite slope and then again
took the long, slow traverse-and-turn, traverse-and-turn path through
the thinning trees and out into the open wind-driven snow field above
them.
Just below the ridgeline, a shelf of packed snow jutted out for a
dozen yards, flat and shielded from the wind by a brief rock face.
Troy halted in the small island in the storm and waited for Alec to
reach him.
He fumbled with mittened fist at the cover of the directional
radiation compass strapped to his left wrist. The outer dial rotated
as soon as the cover lock was released and came to a stop pointing to
magnetic north. The detector needle quartered across the northeast
quadrant of the dial like a hunting dog and then came to rest at
nineteen degrees, just slightly to the left of the direction of their
tracks. An inner dial needle quivered between the yellow and red face
of the intensity meter.
"We should be within a couple of hundred yards of the marker now,"
Troy announced as his short, chunky partner checked alongside. Alec
nodded and peered through the curtain of sky-darkened snow just beyond
the rock face. He could see powder spume whipping off the ridge crest
twenty feet above them but the contour of the sloping ridge was
quickly lost in the falling snow.
[Illustration]
The hydrologists leaned on their ski poles and rested for a few
minutes before tackling the final cold leg of their climb. Each
carried a light, cold-resistance plastic ruckpac slung over their
chemically-heated light-weight ski suits.
A mile and a half below in the dense timber, their two Sno cars were
parked in the shelter of a flattened and fallen spruce and they had
thrown up a quick lean-to of broken boughs to give the vehicles even
more protection from the storm. From there to the top, Troy was right
in his analysis of DivAg. When God made mountain slopes too steep and
timber too thick, it was a man and not a machine that had to do the
job on skis; just as snow surveyors had done a century before when the
old Soil Conservation Service pioneered the new science of snow
hydrology.
The science had come a long way in the century from the days when
teams of surveyors poked a hollow, calibrated aluminum tube into the
snow pack and then read depth and weighed both tube and contents to
determine moisture factors.
Those old-timers fought blizzards and avalanches from November through
March in the bleak, towering peaks of the Northwest to the weathered
crags of the Appalachians, measuring thousands of predesignated snow
courses the last week of each winter month. Upon those readings had
been based the crude, wide-margin streamflow forecasts for the coming
year.
Now, a score of refined instruments did the same job automatically at
hundreds of thousands of almost-inaccessible locations throughout the
northern hemisphere. Or at least, almost automatically. Twenty feet
above the two DivAg hydrologists and less than a hundred yards east,
on the very crest of an unnamed peak in the wilderness of Idaho's
Sawtooth Mountains, radiation snow gauge P11902-87 had quit sending
data three days ago.
The snow-profile flight over the area showed a gap in the graphed
line that flowed over the topographical map of the Sawtooths as the
survey plane flew its daily scan. The hydrotech monitoring the graph
reported the lapse to regional headquarters at Spokane and minutes
later, a communications operator punched up the alternate transmitter
for P11902-87. Nothing happened although the board showed the gauge's
cobalt-60 beta and gamma still hot. Something had gone wrong with the
tiny transducer transmitter. A man, or to be more precise, two men,
had to replace the faulty device.
The two men and the replacement gauge, trudged out again into the face
of the rising storm.
Troy and Alec pushed diagonally up the snow slope, pausing every few
minutes to take new directional readings. The needles were now at
right angles to them and reading well into the "hot" red division of
the intensity meter. They still were ten feet below the crest and a
cornice of snow hung out in a slight roof ahead of them. Both men had
closed the face hatches of their insulated helmets and tiny
circulators automatically went to work drawing off moisture and
condensation from the treated plastic.
"Wonder if that chunk is going to stay put while we go past," Alec
called, eyeing the heavy overhang. Troy paused and the two carefully
looked over the snow roof and the slope that fell away sharply to
their right.
"Looks like it avalanched once before," Troy commented. "Shall we
operate, Dr. Patterson?"
"Better extravagant with the taxpayers' money than sorry for
ourselves," Alec replied, pulling the avalanche gun from his holster.
It looked like an early-day Very pistol, with its big, straight-bore
muzzle. "Let's get back a couple of feet."
They kick-turned and skied back from the sides of the cornice. Alec
raised the gun and aimed at the center of the deepest segment over the
overhang. The gun discharged with a muffled "pop" and the concentrated
ball of plastic explosive arced through the air, visible to the naked
eye. It vanished into the snow roof and the men waited. Ten seconds
later there was a geyser of flame and the smoke and snow as the charge
detonated deep under the overhang. The wind whipped the cloud away and
the roof still held, despite the gaping hole.
"What do you think?" Troy asked.
"One more for good measure," Alec said as he fired again, this time to
the right of the first shot. The plastic detonated in another geyser
of smoke and snow, but the small cloud was instantly lost as the
entire overhang broke and fell the ten to twelve feet from the crest
to the face of the slope and then boiled and rolled, gathering more
snow and greater mass and impetus as it thundered down the slope and
was lost in the storm. The dense clouds of loose powder snow raised by
the avalanche whipped away in the clutches of the wind.
"Well done, Dr. Patterson," Troy called as he leaned into his poles
and moved out across the newly-crushed snow on the slope.
"Thank you, Dr. Braden," Alec called in his wake, "you may proceed to
the patient."
* * * * *
They worked past the buried radiation gauge to the crest and then
turned and came slowly back along the wind ridge, following directly
behind the detection needle. Troy glanced at his intensity gauge. The
needle was on the "danger" line in the red. He stopped. Behind him,
Alec checked his drop slowly down the windward side of the slope,
reading his own meter. When his intensity needle hit the same mark,
he, too, halted about thirty feet to Troy's right.
"I'm dead on," Troy said, indicating with a ski pole an imaginary line
straight ahead.
"I've got it about forty-five degrees left," Alec called, marking his
position and a direction line in the crust with a pole. Each moved
towards the other and from the mid-point of their two markings
extended with their eyes the imaginary lines to an intersecting point
some thirty feet from Troy's original sighting.
"Hand me the heat tank, doctor," Troy said, turning his back to Alec,
"so that we can excavate the patient." Alec unclamped a hand tank and
nozzle device from his pack.
With the tank slung under his arm and with nozzle in hand, Troy moved
forward another ten feet, gauging the wind velocity. He aimed to the
windward of the intersecting lines and triggered the nozzle. A stream
of liquid chemical melting agent shot out into the wind and then
curved back and cut a hole into the snow. Troy moved the nozzle in a
slow arc, making a wide circle in the snow. Then he cut a trough on
the downhill side for more than twenty feet. He adjusted the nozzle
head and a wider stream sprayed out to fall within the already-melting
circle. The concentrated solution was diluted with melting water and
spread its action. As the hydrologists watched, the snow melted into a
deep hole and the chemically-warmed water torrented down the drain cut
to gush out on to the snow slope and quickly refreeze as it emerged
into the sub-zero air.
Troy shut off the liquid and the two men waited and watched. "The
gauge was recording ninety-seven inches of pack when it quit," Alec
said. "Better give 'er another squirt."
Troy fired another spray burst of chemical into the now-deep hole and
then widened the drain trough once more.
Then he began spraying a three-foot wide patch from the edge of the
hole back towards himself. Immediately a new trough began to form in
the snow pack and the water poured off into the hole surrounding the
buried gauge.
While the snow was melting, Alec had removed his skis and stuck them
upright in the snow. He dropped his pack and unfastened a pair of
mountain-climber's ice crampons and lashed them to his ski boots. In
five minutes Troy had "burned" a sloping, ice-glazed ramp deep into
the snow field, sloping down into a ten-foot deep chasm and
terminating on bare wet soil. Sitting on the ground, slightly off
center to one side of the original hole was the foot-round gray metal
shape of radiation snow gauge P11902-87. A half-inch round tube
projected upwards for three inches from the center of the round
device.
* * * * *
Alec was down in the ice chasm, ski pole reversed in his hand.
Standing as far from the gauge as possible, he dangled a leaden cap
from the end of his ski pole over the projecting tube. On the third
try, the cap descended over the open end of the tube, effectively
shielding the radioactive source material in the gauge. Once the cap
was in place, Alec moved up to the gauge and put a lock clamp on the
cap and then picked up the gauge and moved back up the ramp.
The wind was screaming across the top of the slot in the snow pack as
he pushed the device over the edge and then heaved himself out into
the teeth of the storm.
He could barely make out the form of Troy fifty feet east of the
original position of the gauge. The tall engineer had taken the
replacement gauge from his pack and was positioning it into the snow
on the surface of the snow pack. The replacement was bulkier than the
defective unit and it was different in design.
This was a combination radiation-sonar measuring gauge. Placed on top
of an existing snow field, its sonar system kept account of the snow
beneath the gauge to the surface of the soil; the radiation counter
metered the fresh snow that fell on it after it was placed in
position. The two readings were electronically added and fed into the
transducer for automatic transmission.
Troy hollowed out a slight depression in the fresh snow and pressed
the gauge into the hollow, then packed the snow back around it to keep
it from being shifted by the high velocity winds until fresh snows
buried it. Satisfied that it was properly set, he removed the
radiation cap lock and slipped his ski pole through the ring on the
cap. He backed away, lifted the cap from the gauge and then quickly
moved out of the area.
Alec had stowed the bad gauge in his pack and removed a pressure
pillow gauge to put into the deep hole in the snow. The man-cut chasm
would serve as a partial gauge hole and, from a purely research point
of view, it would be interesting to know how much snow would drift and
fall back into the hole. The pressure pillow contained a quantity of
antifreeze solution and some air space. As the snow fell upon the
pillow and piled up, its weight would press down and the pressure upon
the pillow would be measured by instruments and again relayed to a
small transmitter for reading back at Spokane. The pillows were used
in many flat open areas where snow pack was uniform across a large
level surface.
The pillow in place, Alec again climbed from the chasm and was locking
on his skis when Troy slid up. The ice-dry snow was driving almost
horizontally across the face of the ridge and the two engineers had to
lean into the force of the wind to keep their balance. Troy fumbled a
small service monitor from his parka pocket and shifted it to the new
radiation gauge frequency. The signal was steady and strong and its
radioactive source beam was hot.
"Now is the time for all good snow surveyors to get the hell outta
here," Alec exclaimed as he slipped his ruckpac onto his shoulders.
"The gauge O.K.?"
Troy glanced once more at the monitor and nodded. "Hot and clear." He
shoved the monitor back into his pocket and grasped his ski poles.
"Ready?"
"Let's go," Alec replied.
Turning their backs into the wind, the men veered sharply away from
the site of the new gauge and dropped off the crest of the mountain
top back to the lee side of the slope. Out of the worst of the wind,
they skied easily back down towards the timberline.
Once back among the trees, the visibility again rose although the
going was much slower. It would be dark in another two hours and they
wanted to be back at the Sno cars with enough light left to pitch camp
for the night.
"I heard of a guy over in Washington," Troy said as they worked their
way down through the trees, "that won the DivAg award as the most
absent-minded engineer of the decade."
"Since you never tell stories on yourself, it couldn't have been you,"
Alec quipped, "so what happened?"
Troy schussed down an open field in the trees and snowplowed to a
slowdown at the opposite side to once again thread through the dense
spruce and pine.
"This joker did the same job we just finished," he continued. "He put
the new gauge in place while his partner fished the old one out. Then
he forgot that he had put the new gauge in place, uncapped mind you,
and when they took off he skied right over it."
"Right over the top of it," Alec gasped.
"Yup," Troy said.
"What happened to him?"
"Nothing to speak of. Of course, he's the last of his family
tree--genetically speaking, that is."
* * * * *
Fresh snow had completely covered their tracks made during the climb
to the summit, but they wouldn't have followed the same trail back
down in any case. Both men were expert skiers and they cut back down
the shortest route to the Sno cars. A faint audio signal sounded in
their right ears from the homing beacons in the snow vehicles. As they
shifted directions through the trees, the signal shifted from ear to
ear and grew stronger as they neared their cache.
A few minutes later they broke out into the edge of the small clearing
with its downed spruce and the two Sno cars. From the carriers they
extracted light-weight collapsible plastic domed shelters. A half hour
later the domes were joined together by a two-man shelter tube and
their sleeping bags were spread in the rear dome. While Alec was
shaking out the bags and stowing gear, Troy set up the tiny camp
stove in the front dome, broke out the rations and began supper. The
detachable, mercury-battery headlight from one of the Sno cars hung
from the apogee of the front dome and the other car light was in the
sleeping dome.
By the time they had finished eating, the wind had died but the snow
continued to fall, piling up around the outside of the plastic dome as
it drifted and fell. Its sheltering bulk added to the already
near-perfect insulation of the domes. The outer air temperature had
fallen to minus fifteen degrees but the temperature below the surface
of the snow held at a constant twenty-five degrees above zero and
within the front dome with its light and stove, it was a warm
seventy-five. The excess heat escaped through a flue tube in the top
of the dome.
Both men had stripped down to shorts and T-shirt and now quietly
relaxed.
"That's a goodly amount of precip piling up out there," Alec remarked
languidly. "God knows we can use it."
"If this keeps up all night," Troy said, "we may have to dig ourselves
outta here in the morning." He leaned back and surveyed the rounded
roof above him. "Remember what I said this afternoon about nothing
ever changing in DivAg?"
Alec nodded.
"Well, sir, here's another fine example of progress halted dead in its
tracks," the lanky hydrologist went on. "For centuries the Eskimos
have lived through Arctic winters in igloos, made of snow blocks, cut
and rounded to form a cave in the snow.
"What's good enough for the Eskimos is good enough for DivAg. Here we
are right back in the Ice Age, living in an igloo. If that stove used
blubber or seal oil instead of chemical fuel, the picture would be
complete."
Alec grinned. "Just because something is old doesn't mean it's no
good, Dr. Braden," he said. "The Eskimos proved the efficiency of the
igloo. We've just adopted the principle and modernized it. It still
works better than any other known snow-weather shelter. But I didn't
see you cutting any snow blocks with your skinning knife to build this
snug haven, nor crawling for hours on your belly across the snow to
sneak up on a seal for your supper."
"Technicalities," Troy scoffed lazily. "The point is, that here were
are living almost under the same conditions that the primitive savages
of the frozen north lived under for centuries." He belched gently and
stretched his long legs luxuriously away from the webbing of the
bucket camp chair.
[Illustration]
"I must say that you seem to be enjoying it," Alec commented.
"Primitive or not, I still like this better than those rat warrens
they call cities today."
* * * * *
Nearly two miles above them, the replacement snow gauge, C11902-87,
already buried in a half-foot of new snow, sent out a strong and
steady signal. At midnight, when both snow hydrologists were sleeping
soundly in their bags, hundreds of miles away in regional survey
headquarters at Spokane, the huge electronic sequencer began its rapid
signal check of each of the thousands of snow gauges in the five-state
area of Region Six.
A dozen red lights flicked on among the thousands of green pinpoints
of illumination on the huge mural map of the area indicating gauges
not reporting due to malfunctions. The technician on duty compared the
red lights with the trouble sheet in his hand. He noted two new
numbers on the list. When he came to C11902-87, he glanced again at
the map. A minute, steady green ray came from the tiny dot in the
center of a contour circle that indicated a nameless peak in the
Sawtooth Range.
The technician lined out C11902-87 on the trouble chart. "They got to
that one in a hurry," he murmured to himself. Another figure had been
returned to the accuracy percentage forecasting figures of the huge
computers that dictated the lives and luxuries of more than a half a
billion Americans.
Water, not gold, now set the standard of living for an overpopulated,
overindustrialized continent, where the great automated farms and
ranches fought desperately to produce the food for a half billion
stomachs while competing with that same half billion for every drop of
life-giving moisture that went into the soil.
In the winter, the snows and early fall rains fell in the watershed
mountains of the continent, then melted and either seeped into the
soil or first trickled, then gushed and finally leaped in freshets
down from the highlands to the streams and rivers. As the great cities
spread and streamflow waters were dammed and stored and then metered
out, there was no longer enough to meet agricultural, industrial and
municipal needs.
The cities sent down shaft after shaft into the underground aquifers,
greedily sucking the moisture out of the land until each day, each
month and each year, the water tables fell deeper and deeper until
they, too, were gone, and the land was sucked dry.
There was water in the highlands, in watersheds and spilling unused
down to the sea in many areas. Soon the cities and industries sent out
great plastisteel arteries to bring the lifeblood of the land to the
vast sponges of the factories and showers in home and food-processing
plants and landrounits. Water for the machine-precise rows of soy bean
plants and for babies' formulas and water for great nuclear power
plants and water for a tiny, sixty-fifth floor apartment flower box.
But there was never enough and a nation finally could no longer evade
the situation that had been forewarned and foredoomed a century
earlier by the pioneers of conservation.
Only by total conservation of every possible drop of moisture could
the nation survive, and to conserve, it is first necessary to have an
accurate and constantly-current inventory of the substance that is to
be conserved.
To the executive branch of the government had come the Secretary of
Water Resources, and with the creation of the new cabinet office, the
former cabinet posts of Agriculture and Interior were relegated to
subordinate and divisional status.
To the thousands upon thousands of trained hydrologists,
meteorologists and agronomists of the federal agencies of
agriculture, interior and commerce fell the task of manipulating and
guiding the delicate balance of the world's water cycle. The snows and
rains fell upon the earth, to soak into the land, flow down the
streams and rivers to the sea or to the great lakes, and then be
returned to the atmosphere to fall again in the ageless cycle of life.
But the happenstance habits of nature were steadily being integrated
into the control program of man. The rains and snow still fell where
nature intended but man was now there to gauge and guide the moisture
in a carefully controlled path through its cycle back to the
atmosphere.
An inch or an acre-foot of water falling as snow upon the high
mountains was used over and over many times and by many persons before
returning to its starting place in the atmosphere.
With the age of nuclear power, the need for hydroelectric sources
vanished and with it went the great dams and reservoirs with their
vast, wasteful surfaces of open water that evaporated by the thousands
of acre-feet before ever being utilized by man. The beds of the great
rivers were dry and the cities spread upon them together with the new
controlled auto-farms. Only the smaller rivers and streams continued
to flow until they reached a predesignated flow force. Then they
vanished, spilling down into tunnels and flowing for hundreds of miles
along subterranean aqueducts into great storage reservoirs beneath the
surface of the land and protected from the drain of the sun and wind.
From these, each precious drop of water was rationed upwards to meet
the increasing needs of the people. And still there was never enough.
* * * * *
It was still snowing when Troy and Alec awoke in the morning. The
snows had drifted over both the domes on the windward side. They
cooked a quick breakfast and then Alec began stowing the camp gear
into its compact containers. Troy took a small hand shovel and crawled
out through the double opening of the front dome and tunneled his way
up out of the snow. Twin plumes of vapor rose through the snow that
curved in gentle hummocks over the buried domes. The tall engineer
shoveled a short path to the downed spruce and cleared the way into
the shelter where the Sno cars waited. He removed the protecting
boughs and shoveled a short ramp out of the trough to the surface of
the snow.
The temperature had risen during the night and the snow had changed
from the crystal dry powder of the night before to fluffy, gentle
flakes, falling in a steady curtain through the trees. Troy opened the
side hatch of the bubble canopy of his Sno car and climbed in. He slid
into the single bucket seat and with a flick of his finger set the
tiny reaction motor into operation. Moments later heat filled the
bubble and a cloud of steam moisture flared from the thrust pipes.
The ten-foot-long tapered Snow car sat on twin broad-planted skis in
front with a single retractable wheel raised between them for snow
travel. At the wider rear, another pair of short, broad ski blades
rested on the surface of the snow on either side of a wide, continuous
track assembly. A pair of handle bars, much like an early-day
motorcycle, extended into the bubble from the front fork. The grips
were studded with additional control buttons. Troy pressed one and the
two rear skis rose on outrigger arms like a small catamaran to allow
the Sno car to sink a couple of inches back onto the gripper track.
As the weight of the vehicle shifted to the track assembly it
automatically diverted the tiny nuclear engine output from jet thrust
to gear box drive. Troy settled himself in the seat and increased the
power. The track started to turn and the Sno car glided slowly out
from under the protecting branches and churned up the slight ramp to
the top of the snow pack. He turned the front skis and plowed to a
halt beside the tunnel into the domes.
Alec emerged with one of the camp kits and handed it up to his
partner, then went to the shelter for his own Sno car. Troy stowed the
kit in the carrier and dismounted and began digging snow away from the
domes. Alec's Sno car pulled up alongside and the chunky engineer
vanished once more into the domes to emerge with his own kit. Then he
joined Troy in the digging operation. Fifteen minutes later, both
domes were collapsed and stowed in the carriers. The men boarded their
vehicles.
Inside the warm bubble canopies, air circulators kept the plastic free
of condensation. Outside, the snow glanced off the treated surface,
keeping it clear.
"Lead off, Dr. Patterson," Troy called out over the car radio.
Alec increased power and the track of his Sno car dug into the soft
surface, then caught and the vehicle moved forward and into the trees.
Troy fell into line behind the other vehicle as they drove down the
gentle slope towards the snow-covered access trail another mile below
them on the side of the mountain.
Out of the trees and onto the trail, both drivers shifted gears,
dropping rear skis to the more solid pack of the trail and sending
jets of steam shooting out from the thrust tubes of the Sno cars. Troy
dropped back to stay out of Alec's vapor cloud as they now glided
smoothly and easily along the trail. A bright red metal pole, topped
by a small housing and antenna came into view on the side of the road.
The tube went down through the snow and deep into the soil of the
mountain side. Inside, electrostats read soil moisture at depths up to
thirty feet and transmitted the information on automatic or demand
signal.
Ahead, the vapor cloud from Alec's Sno car vanished as the trail
dipped down the side of the mountain and the driver cut his thrust to
let the momentum carry him on the twin set of skis. Troy gunned his
car for a final burst of speed then cut rear drive and dropped
swoopingly down the grade, whipping along in Alec's tracks. The trail
curved sharply ahead and Troy gently manipulated the front fork skis
into a snowplow to cut speed. His fingers rested lightly on the
pressure switch that would open small scoops on the under surfaces of
all skis for additional braking power. As a final resort, the engine
thrust could be shifted from rear to forward reaction to bring him to
a complete stop and even send the car backwards.
* * * * *
The Sno car whipped around and down the trail. As the roadway swung to
the south slope of the range, the track in the fresh snow cut by the
lead vehicle turned dark gray and then almost black. When the present
storm had ended and before new snow fell again, the south slopes would
again be stained with clouds of black, mono-molecular film, gushing
out in clouds behind spray jets of the survey planes. Each successive
layer was treated, lessening the evaporative surface effects of the
sun upon the south slopes and holding as much of the moisture-giving
snow to the earth for controlled runoff. A pair of fresh elk-tracks
came down the side of the mountain and cut across the trail and Troy
braked to peer through the trees for a glimpse of the animals. But
they had vanished, frightened by the sudden intrusion of the men.
A half hour later and four thousand feet lower, the trail joined a
wider and more traveled road. Alec turned onto the road and increased
speed. A few minutes later, the Sno cars flashed by a sign reading
"Elk City--4 miles." Alec cut speed and waited for Troy to pull
alongside, then the two cars glided slowly to the edge of the
wilderness community. At the outskirts of the little town the snow on
the road came to an abrupt end. Chemically-treated paving kept the
roadways warm and bare of snow. Ahead, the pavement into town was wet
and glistening and even falling snow had stopped. Rear skis were again
retracted and the front wheels lowered for non-snow driving and then
the two vehicles rumbled slowly into Elk City.
They came to a halt at the ranger station and dismounted.
"Let's call for a taxi and then go for a cup of coffee and another
bite," Troy said. "I'm starved again."
"You and that hollow stomach to match your head," Alec grunted.
They entered the ranger station. Behind the counter, one of the four
rangers on permanent duty at the station was transferring a radar
storm plot onto a weather chart. He glanced up as the two men entered.
"Back so soon," he commented. "That was a quick trip. Get the job
done?"
"Neither rain, snow or sun stops the Division of Agriculture in its
appointed rounds," Troy said flippantly. "Harry, call Spokane and tell
'em we're ready for a pickup, please."
The ranger reached for a mike. "Spokane Region," he called, "this is
Elk City station."
"This is Spokane," came the reply.
"Your two snow boys are here," Harry said, "looking for a lift. Can
you send a 'copter after them?"
"Affirmative, Elk City," Spokane communicator replied. "We'll pick
them up in about forty-five minutes."
"Thanks, Harry," Troy said. "We're going to take a walk uptown and get
something to eat. If the chopper should get here sooner, tell him
we'll be right back."
"O.K.," the ranger said, "but there's a pot of coffee on the stove in
the kitchen if you want to save yourself the walk."
Alec grimaced. "I had a cup of that concentrated sulphuric acid you
call coffee on the way up," he said. "No thanks, anyway. What do you
make that stuff out of? Leftover road oil?"
"Man's drink for a real man," the ranger grinned. "Us forestry men
learn to make coffee from pine pitch. Makes a man outta you."
"Huh," Alec sniffed as they turned to leave, "pine pitch is just sap
and anyone who'd drink that stuff deserves the name--'sap' that is."
The ranger grinned as the hydrologists walked out.
* * * * *
Troy and Alec were walking back up the street to the station when the
big cargo copter settled down to the pad at the rear of the station.
They hurried their pace and got to their Sno cars. By the time they
had driven around to the pad, the copter crew had lowered the ramp and
they drove directly up and into the craft. A row of front-wheel racks
studded the after wall of the cargo deck and Troy and Alec nosed their
Sno cars into the racks. By the time they had cut power and climbed
out, the crewmen had cargo locks on both vehicles.
The crew chief closed the ramp and punched a signal button. As Troy
and Alec climbed up the gangway to the crew-passenger deck, the big
jet rotors were already churning and the copter lifted into the again
lightly falling snow.
The hydrologists settled into seats for the short ride to Spokane. The
copter swung to the northwest, roaring a thousand feet above the
snow-covered mountain tops. They soared over the Clearwater River that
flowed to its confluence with the once-mighty Snake River at Lewiston
where both vanished into a subterranean aqueduct. As they neared
Spokane, the country began to flatten out into the great Columbia
basin, where once nearly a fifth of the nation's entire electrical
output was produced in a series of hydroelectric dams on the great
river and its tributaries. A century ago, high tension power
transmission lines and towers laced the face of the nation, carrying
power from the waterways to the wheels of industry and cities hundreds
of miles away. Like the dams, they, too, were gone and each industry
and metropolis and village generated its own power with compact
nuclear reactors.
The copter dropped down into an airways lane as it came over the edge
of the suburbs of Greater Spokane. The air lane followed almost
directly above one of the crowded ten-lane North American Continental
Thruways that cut five-mile wide swaths across the continent from
Fairbanks to the southern borders of Mexico; from San Francisco to
Washington, D.C., and from Montreal to Vancouver.
As the chopper settled down over the heliport at Region Six
headquarters, Troy and Alec climbed back down to the cargo deck and
went to their Sno cars. On the ground, the ramp came down and they
drove out of the copter and across the pad towards Snow Hydrology
Section's motor park. The Sno cars were parked in the garage for a
service check and with their ruckpacs slung over one shoulder, they
headed for the offices.
The prominent peak of Mount Spokane north of the city gleamed
intermittently as the sun began to break through the remnants of the
storm now blowing away to the east.
"I hope I don't get transferred out of the Region," Alec said moodily
as he surveyed the distant mountain.
"Why should you?" Troy asked.
"You never know what's going to happen when you step up a notch," Alec
replied. "You know that both of us are due for grade promotion
sometime this year to senior status. Depends on how many Grade One
senior hydrologists they need in the Region."
"Snow is snow," Troy shrugged. "It doesn't really make that much
difference to me. If they want me to move, I'll move."
"It's doesn't make much difference to you," his partner said, "because
you're not married yet. But with Carol and Jimmy, it makes a lot of
difference to me. It's bad enough living like we do here, jamming in
against five hundred other families in the complex. The only thing
that makes it worthwhile is the chance to get away from the city with
the family on our days off. I want that kid of mine to know what real
country looks and feels like. God help him if I should get transferred
back east."
"You could always resign," Troy said half seriously.
Alec stopped dead in his tracks and turned to stare at him. "Are you
out of your mind," he cried. "Resign from this for what? For the
chance to be buried in a city or a bureau for the rest of my life?
Never to see the mountains except on rare vacations and then with a
guide on my back? Never to see a river flowing or fight a trout? Have
my kid grow up with his only knowledge of the woods from history books
with an occasional trip to the zoo to see what a deer or elk looks
like. I'd rather half-starve as an autologger operator in some gyppo
timber camp than live like that."
"I was just kidding," Troy said. "When it comes right down to it, I
wouldn't be happy away from this either. Come on, let's check in with
the 'Scourge of the Northwest.'"
At SHS headquarters, they dropped their ruckpacs by the door and Alec
fished the faulty radiation gauge from his pack. Then they went in to
report to Snow Supervisor Morley Wilson, known affectionately to his
subordinates as "The Scourge."
The leather-textured face of the senior engineer turned up at them as
they entered the office. Wilson's face was tanned and weather-beaten
by the sun, wind and snows of a thousand mountains and it was rumoured
that when he went up for annual physical examination, the lab merely
ran pollution tests on the ice water that flowed in his veins instead
of blood.
"I didn't expect you two back so soon," he said with a scowl. "What's
the matter? Couldn't you get to the gauge?"
Alec laid the faulty device on Wildon's desk. "No trouble, boss. Just
speedy work by your best juniors."
Wilson snorted. "You must have had the chopper land you on the ridge
in spite of orders." He reached for the gauge. Troy and Alec exchanged
smiles. The old man had received a full report of the conditions in
the Sawtooths together with a check on their activities at least an
hour ago. He knew what they had to contend with to switch the
gauge--and he knew they knew he was just barking.
"Another one of the transmitters shot again," he muttered. Wilson
punched the intercom on his desk. "Shiver," he called, "get up here
and get this radiation gauge you said was so good."
In the communications repair section three levels underground, the
senior comm tech snapped out a fast "yessir" and bolted for the door.
"What did you leave up there?" Wilson asked.
"We put a CS gauge thirty feet from the survey point," Troy said. "It
was working fine and it's on a flat shelf with virtually the same pack
and strata formation this one came out of."
"What's it look like up there," Wilson asked. The supervisor was
nearing the end of forty years of service with Snow Hydrology and in
his early days, the last vestiges of the crude "man-on-the-spot"
surveys were still in operation.
Despite loud and emphatic defense and reliance on the new and complex
techniques of electronic measurements, he still felt the need to feel
the texture of the snows himself and to observe with his own eyes the
sweep of the snow pack molded against the shoulder of a towering crag.
Chained to the desk by responsibility, he used the eyes of his junior
engineers and surveyors to keep a semblance of the "seat of the pants"
technique of forecasting that he had lived with and lived by.
"The pack is good," Alec reported, "and what we saw of the south
slopes is holding well. It was snowing from the time we got into the
area until we pulled out this morning, so we didn't really get a long
sighting. But what we saw looked fine."
The old man nodded with satisfaction. "You two go get out of that
field gear and then report back here in an hour. We've got a staff
conference and I want you two in on it." He dismissed them with a wave
of his hand and went back to the reports piled on his desk.
In the locker room, Troy and Alec peeled out of the snowsuits and
changed into street clothes. "I wonder what's in the wind," Troy asked
thoughtfully. "Must be something big enough to bug the old man into
brain-picking, otherwise he'd never stoop to juniors before making a
decision."
"Probably just wants to set up next summer's vacation schedule," Alec
grunted as he bent over to slip on his shoes. "You can bet that if it
were something important, he'd never be concerned with the opinions of
the likes of us."
* * * * *
An hour later they walked back into the supervisor's office to find it
jammed with the heads of all sections together with leading techs and
junior engineers. "Go next door and grab yourselves a couple of
chairs," Wilson barked, "and then get back in here."
When the full staff was assembled, Wilson stood up and faced the
group.
"This won't take too long," he began, "but it's a problem that I want
all of you to be considering during the next fifteen days because we
have to come up with a reasonable solution to the problem--just
another one that's been dumped in our laps."
He pressed a button on his desk and a mural, three-dimensional
typographical map of the five-state Region Six flashed on the wall
behind him. Across the top of the map was a line of illuminated
numerical panels that shifted in values before their eyes, changing
with the factor information constantly being fed into the computers.
These were the constant monitoring reports from the regional computers
on snow pack, moisture content, streamflow, water consumption and
other that formulated the equations that the forecasters and ration
controllers user in determining water supply allocations.
Hundreds of multi-colored lights on the map indicated industrial,
municipal, domestic and agricultural water use facilities.
"We've been asked to assist in the critical situation in Region Five,"
Wilson continued. "Region Five included California, Nevada, Arizona
and Utah. As you've seen from the combined western forecasts, snow
pack has been much below normal this year in Region Five and has for
the past three years. We've been piping a lot of water down the line
and so far, they've been able to meet demands. But a new factor has
entered.
"For the past three years, again as many of you are aware, Space
Department has been gearing for the start of Venus Colony. I'm not
expert in this field but from what friends of mine who are closely
associated with the project tell me, there's a big difference in
building a vehicle to carry a survey and exploration team and the
technology involved in building both vehicles and life-support
equipment for a colony operation. All of which leads up to the current
problem.
"Our friends in Space have now firmed up the specialized equipment
they want and the quantities. Prototype of all of this gear have been
built and tested, mostly fabricated by the Southern California Space
and Electronics Complex. Now they're ready to go into production. But
the fly in the ointment is that it calls for five new production
units.
"With the Southern Cal Complex operating under water deficits plus
transmission costs for the past three years and with no improvement in
sight, they just don't have the water to handle five more major
industrial units. Their population census is also up again. This means
the units will have to be located somewhere else, possibly only until
the production schedule is completed; possibly on a permanent basis if
Venus Colony pans out. The trained manpower pool is in Southern Cal
Complex and it will have to be displaced to wherever the units are
located."
* * * * *
Wilson paused for a moment and looked around the room.
"I can see that you're way ahead of me. And you're right. We've been
asked to make a projection to determine if we can handle them in
Region Six, preferably in the Portland-Seattle Industrial Complex or
near thereto."
He indicated a stack of bound manuscripts on his desk. "These are
copies of the full prospectus of the proposed units; power output,
equipment, manpower, water absorption, water return, domestic and
municipal demands, et cetera, for the project.
"I want each of you to take a copy, study it in the light of your
specialty, and then submit your recommendations to your department and
section chiefs within the next ten days. The departmental and
sectional reports will be consolidated for my study and then we'll
make our report to Washington.
"But let me give you this parting thought to keep foremost in your
consideration. In all probability, whether we agree to it or not,
we're going to get stuck with the units. We have the most dependable
water recharge in the nation and we have the physical space for the
units. Dislocating and trying to relocate just the people involved in
this project is a monumental thing in itself and would be a virtual
impossibility east of the Mississippi. You can bet your last cent that
this was all taken into account before Washington ever politely
suggested that we review the situation and give our opinion.
"I don't think they give a damn about our opinions. They just want to
see how lavishly they can operate with what we offer. So bear that in
mind for my information. I need to know as close to the absolute last
drop of moisture where this is going to put us and where we have to
shut down and cut corners throughout the Region to accommodate the new
industry.
"Now we're not going to get this solved or anything else done by my
talking about it. Get out of here and back to work. You've got ten
days to come up with the answer and you can expect to be saddled with
the additional production units within one hundred twenty days. That's
all gentlemen except to say that, as occurred when I asked you two
years ago for a similar projection for the laser unit complex, I will
not accept any solutions calling for a pogrom of all Anglo white
Protestants between the ages of six and sixty."
The meeting broke up in laughter as the engineers crowded up to the
desk to pick up copies of the prospectus.
Troy and Alec fell into step with Jordan Plumber, their section chief.
"One thing you have to admire in the old man," Alec commented, "he has
faith in his staff to come up with the answers."
"Hm-m-m," Plumber sniffed, "he doesn't need faith. He's a realist from
the old school. He knows that we have no choice and all that's left is
to come up with a formula for living with the situation. It doesn't
bother him a bit how we figure this one. He knows we have to work it
out."
Back at their combination laboratory and office area, the trio split
up to their respective cubicles to go over the report. Troy and Alec,
as semispecialists in snow depth and moisture gauges, would study the
problem from the viewpoint of increasing the accuracy and volume of
their instruments in inventorying Region Six snowfall. Other members
of the headquarters staff would tackle it from soil moisture content;
stored water capabilities; increasing domestic, municipal and
industrial water economies; while the meteorology men would venture
even farther into left field via data, formula and Ouija board, to
increase the potential future limits of their forecasts.
The key to the entire problem lay in streamflow forecasting. Accuracy
in predicting the amount of water entering the vast underground
reservoirs now had reached ninety-eight point three per cent. Yet in
the remaining one point seven per cent was the equivalent of more than
seventy-five million acre feet of water. The question now was--how
much more water would the new units require and could the forecast be
projected another tenth or more percentage points closer to supply
than demand.
That was the basic problem. There were thousands of allied problems
involved, ranging from where and how the additional water would be
stored and channeled and how it could be used after the new factories
had had initial use.
At 1630, Alec stuck his copy of the prospectus, together with some
other more pressing reports, in his briefcase and headed for home. He
stopped in the door to Troy's cubicle.
"You going to work all night?" he asked.
Troy swung his feet down from his desk and snubbed out his cigarette.
"Nope," he replied, "but I thought I'd finish reading this before I
shoved off. After all, I haven't got a section chief waiting for me at
home with a stop-watch in hand to make sure I report in on time. All I
have waiting for me at the apartment is a good, cold highball."