"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.