markingsextended with their eyes the imaginary lines to an intersecting pointsome 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 andnozzle device from his pack.
With the tank slung under his arm and with nozzle in hand, Troy movedforward another ten feet, gauging the wind velocity. He aimed to thewindward of the intersecting lines and triggered the nozzle. A streamof liquid chemical melting agent shot out into the wind and thencurved back and cut a hole into the snow. Troy moved the nozzle in aslow arc, making a wide circle in the snow. Then he cut a trough onthe downhill side for more than twenty feet. He adjusted the nozzlehead and a wider stream sprayed out to fall within the already-meltingcircle. The concentrated solution was diluted with melting water andspread its action. As the hydrologists watched, the snow melted into adeep hole and the chemically-warmed water torrented down the drain cutto gush out on to the snow slope and quickly refreeze as it emergedinto the sub-zero air.
Troy shut off the liquid and the two men waited and watched. "Thegauge was recording ninety-seven inches of pack when it quit," Alecsaid. "Better give 'er another squirt."
Troy fired another spray burst of chemical into the now-deep hole andthen widened the drain trough once more.
Then he began spraying a three-foot wide patch from the edge of thehole back towards himself. Immediately a new trough began to form inthe snow pack and the water poured off into the hole surrounding theburied gauge.
While the snow was melting, Alec had removed his skis and stuck themupright in the snow. He dropped his pack and unfastened a pair ofmountain-climber's ice crampons and lashed them to his ski boots. Infive minutes Troy had "burned" a sloping, ice-glazed ramp deep intothe snow field, sloping down into a ten-foot deep chasm andterminating on bare wet soil. Sitting on the ground, slightly offcenter to one side of the original hole was the foot-round gray metalshape of radiation snow gauge P11902-87. A half-inch round tubeprojected upwards for three inches from the center of the rounddevice.
* * * * *
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 capfrom the end of his ski pole over the projecting tube. On the thirdtry, the cap descended over the open end of the tube, effectivelyshielding the radioactive source material in the gauge. Once the capwas in place, Alec moved up to the gauge and put a lock clamp on thecap 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 ashe pushed the device over the edge and then heaved himself out intothe teeth of the storm.
He could barely make out the form of Troy fifty feet east of theoriginal position of the gauge. The tall engineer had taken thereplacement gauge from his pack and was positioning it into the snowon the surface of the snow pack. The replacement was bulkier than thedefective unit and it was different in design.
This was a combination radiation-sonar measuring gauge. Placed on topof an existing snow field, its sonar system kept account of the snowbeneath the gauge to the surface of the soil; the radiation countermetered the fresh snow that fell on it after it was placed inposition. The two readings were electronically added and fed into thetransducer for automatic transmission.
Troy hollowed out a slight depression in the fresh snow and pressedthe gauge into the hollow, then packed the snow back around it to keepit from being shifted by the high velocity winds until fresh snowsburied it. Satisfied that it was properly set, he removed theradiation cap lock and slipped his ski pole through the ring on thecap. He backed away, lifted the cap from the gauge and then quicklymoved out of the area.
Alec had stowed the bad gauge in his pack and removed a pressurepillow gauge to put into the deep hole in the snow. The man-cut chasmwould serve as a partial gauge hole and, from a purely research pointof view, it would be interesting to know how much snow would drift andfall back into the hole. The pressure pillow contained a quantity ofantifreeze solution and some air space. As the snow fell upon thepillow and piled up, its weight would press down and the pressure uponthe pillow would be measured by instruments and again relayed to asmall transmitter for reading back at Spokane. The pillows were usedin many flat open areas where snow pack was uniform across a largelevel surface.
The pillow in place, Alec again climbed from the chasm and was lockingon his skis when Troy slid up. The ice-dry snow was driving almosthorizontally across the face of the ridge and the two engineers had tolean into the force of the wind to keep their balance. Troy fumbled asmall service monitor from his parka pocket and shifted it to the newradiation gauge frequency. The signal was steady and strong and itsradioactive source beam was hot.
"Now is the time for all good snow surveyors to get the hell outtahere," 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." Heshoved 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 fromthe site of the new gauge and dropped off the crest of the mountaintop 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 thegoing was much slower. It would be dark in another two hours and theywanted to be back at the Sno cars with enough light left to pitch campfor the night.
"I heard of a guy over in Washington," Troy said as they worked theirway down through the trees, "that won the DivAg award as the mostabsent-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 aslowdown at the opposite side to once again thread through the densespruce and pine.
"This joker did the same job we just finished," he continued. "He putthe new gauge in place while his partner fished the old one out. Thenhe 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 familytree--genetically speaking, that is."
* * * * *
Fresh snow had completely covered their tracks made during the climbto the summit, but they wouldn't have followed the same trail backdown in any case. Both men were expert skiers and they cut back downthe shortest route to the Sno cars. A faint audio signal sounded intheir right ears from the homing beacons in the snow vehicles. As theyshifted directions through the trees, the signal shifted from ear toear and grew stronger as they neared their cache.
A few minutes later they broke out into the edge of the small clearingwith its downed spruce and the two Sno cars. From the carriers theyextracted light-weight collapsible plastic domed shelters. A half hourlater the domes were joined together by a two-man shelter tube andtheir sleeping bags were spread in the rear dome. While Alec wasshaking out the bags and stowing gear, Troy set up the tiny campstove in the front dome, broke out the rations and began supper. Thedetachable, mercury-battery headlight from one of the Sno cars hungfrom the apogee of the front dome and the other car light was in thesleeping dome.
By the time they had finished eating, the wind had died but the snowcontinued to fall, piling up around the outside of the plastic dome asit drifted and fell. Its sheltering bulk added to the alreadynear-perfect insulation of the domes. The outer air temperature hadfallen to minus fifteen degrees but the temperature below the surfaceof the snow held at a constant twenty-five degrees above zero andwithin the front dome with its light and stove, it was a warmseventy-five. The excess heat escaped through a flue
tube in the topof the dome.
Both men had stripped down to shorts and T-shirt and now quietlyrelaxed.
"That's a goodly amount of precip piling up out there," Alec remarkedlanguidly. "God knows we can use it."
"If this keeps up all night," Troy said, "we may have to dig ourselvesoutta here in the morning." He leaned back and surveyed the roundedroof above him. "Remember what I said this afternoon about nothingever changing in DivAg?"
Alec nodded.
"Well, sir, here's another fine example of progress halted dead in itstracks," the lanky hydrologist went on. "For centuries the Eskimoshave lived through Arctic winters in igloos, made of snow blocks, cutand rounded to form a cave in the snow.
"What's good enough for the Eskimos is good enough for DivAg. Here weare right back in the Ice