The Golden Age Of Science Fiction Vol Iv Part 88

"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.

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 a.n.a.lysis of DivAg. When G.o.d 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 m.u.f.fled "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 ma.s.s 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 quant.i.ty of antifreeze solution and some air s.p.a.ce. 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 h.e.l.l 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. "G.o.d 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.

"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 munic.i.p.al 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 a.s.sembly. 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 b.u.t.tons. 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 a.s.sembly 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."