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 water