ge 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