The Thirst Quenchers Read online

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  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction September 1963.Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright onthis publication was renewed.

  THE THIRST QUENCHERS

  Earth has more water surface than land surface--but that does not mean we have all the water we want to drink. And right now, America is already pressing the limits of fresh water supply....

  BY RICK RAPHAEL

  ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE SCHELLING

  * * * * *

  "You know the one thing I really like about working for DivAg?" TroyBraden muttered into his face-mask pickup.

  Ten yards behind Troy, and following in his ski tracks, his partnerAlec Patterson paused to duck under a snow-laden spruce bough beforeanswering. It was snowing heavily, a cold, dry crystal snow, piling upinch upon inch on the already deep snow pack of the Sawtooth Mountainrange. In another ten minutes they would be above the timberline andthe full force of the storm would hit them.

  "Tell me, Mr. Bones," he asked as he poled easily in Troy's tracks,"what is the one thing you really like about working for the Divisionof Agriculture?"

  Troy tracked around a trough of bitterbrush that bent and foughtagainst the deep snow. "It's so dependable," he said, "so reliable, sounchanging. In nearly two centuries, the world has left behind thesteel age; has advanced to nucleonics, tissue regeneration,autoservice bars and electronically driven yo-yos. Everyone in theworld except the United States Division of Agriculture. The tried andtrue method is the rock up on which our integrity stands--even thoughit was tried more than a hundred years ago."

  He dropped out of sight over a small hummock and whipped down the sideof a slight depression in the slope, his skis whispering over the drysnow and sending up a churning crest of white from their tips.

  Alec chuckled and poled after him into the basin. The two young juniorhydrologists worked their way up the opposite slope and then againtook the long, slow traverse-and-turn, traverse-and-turn path throughthe thinning trees and out into the open wind-driven snow field abovethem.

  Just below the ridgeline, a shelf of packed snow jutted out for adozen yards, flat and shielded from the wind by a brief rock face.Troy halted in the small island in the storm and waited for Alec toreach him.

  He fumbled with mittened fist at the cover of the directionalradiation compass strapped to his left wrist. The outer dial rotatedas soon as the cover lock was released and came to a stop pointing tomagnetic north. The detector needle quartered across the northeastquadrant of the dial like a hunting dog and then came to rest atnineteen degrees, just slightly to the left of the direction of theirtracks. An inner dial needle quivered between the yellow and red faceof the intensity meter.

  "We should be within a couple of hundred yards of the marker now,"Troy announced as his short, chunky partner checked alongside. Alecnodded and peered through the curtain of sky-darkened snow just beyondthe rock face. He could see powder spume whipping off the ridge cresttwenty feet above them but the contour of the sloping ridge wasquickly lost in the falling snow.

  The hydrologists leaned on their ski poles and rested for a fewminutes before tackling the final cold leg of their climb. Eachcarried a light, cold-resistance plastic ruckpac slung over theirchemically-heated light-weight ski suits.

  A mile and a half below in the dense timber, their two Sno cars wereparked in the shelter of a flattened and fallen spruce and they hadthrown up a quick lean-to of broken boughs to give the vehicles evenmore protection from the storm. From there to the top, Troy was rightin his analysis of DivAg. When God made mountain slopes too steep andtimber too thick, it was a man and not a machine that had to do thejob on skis; just as snow surveyors had done a century before when theold Soil Conservation Service pioneered the new science of snowhydrology.

  The science had come a long way in the century from the days whenteams of surveyors poked a hollow, calibrated aluminum tube into thesnow pack and then read depth and weighed both tube and contents todetermine moisture factors.

  Those old-timers fought blizzards and avalanches from November throughMarch in the bleak, towering peaks of the Northwest to the weatheredcrags of the Appalachians, measuring thousands of predesignated snowcourses the last week of each winter month. Upon those readings hadbeen based the crude, wide-margin streamflow forecasts for the comingyear.

  Now, a score of refined instruments did the same job automatically athundreds of thousands of almost-inaccessible locations throughout thenorthern hemisphere. Or at least, almost automatically. Twenty feetabove the two DivAg hydrologists and less than a hundred yards east,on the very crest of an unnamed peak in the wilderness of Idaho'sSawtooth Mountains, radiation snow gauge P11902-87 had quit sendingdata three days ago.

  The snow-profile flight over the area showed a gap in the graphedline that flowed over the topographical map of the Sawtooths as thesurvey plane flew its daily scan. The hydrotech monitoring the graphreported the lapse to regional headquarters at Spokane and minuteslater, a communications operator punched up the alternate transmitterfor P11902-87. Nothing happened although the board showed the gauge'scobalt-60 beta and gamma still hot. Something had gone wrong with thetiny 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 faceof the rising storm.

  Troy and Alec pushed diagonally up the snow slope, pausing every fewminutes to take new directional readings. The needles were now atright angles to them and reading well into the "hot" red division ofthe intensity meter. They still were ten feet below the crest and acornice of snow hung out in a slight roof ahead of them. Both men hadclosed the face hatches of their insulated helmets and tinycirculators automatically went to work drawing off moisture andcondensation from the treated plastic.

  "Wonder if that chunk is going to stay put while we go past," Aleccalled, eyeing the heavy overhang. Troy paused and the two carefullylooked over the snow roof and the slope that fell away sharply totheir right.

  "Looks like it avalanched once before," Troy commented. "Shall weoperate, Dr. Patterson?"

  "Better extravagant with the taxpayers' money than sorry forourselves," Alec replied, pulling the avalanche gun from his holster.It looked like an early-day Very pistol, with its big, straight-boremuzzle. "Let's get back a couple of feet."

  They kick-turned and skied back from the sides of the cornice. Alecraised the gun and aimed at the center of the deepest segment over theoverhang. The gun discharged with a muffled "pop" and the concentratedball of plastic explosive arced through the air, visible to the nakedeye. It vanished into the snow roof and the men waited. Ten secondslater there was a geyser of flame and the smoke and snow as the chargedetonated deep under the overhang. The wind whipped the cloud away andthe 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 tothe right of the first shot. The plastic detonated in another geyserof smoke and snow, but the small cloud was instantly lost as theentire overhang broke and fell the ten to twelve feet from the crestto the face of the slope and then boiled and rolled, gathering moresnow and greater mass and impetus as it thundered down the slope andwas lost in the storm. The dense clouds of loose powder snow raised bythe avalanche whipped away in the clutches of the wind.

  "Well done, Dr. Patterson," Troy called as he leaned into his polesand moved out across the newl
y-crushed snow on the slope.

  "Thank you, Dr. Braden," Alec called in his wake, "you may proceed tothe patient."

  * * * * *

  They worked past the buried radiation gauge to the crest and thenturned and came slowly back along the wind ridge, following directlybehind the detection needle. Troy glanced at his intensity gauge. Theneedle 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 linestraight ahead.

  "I've got it about forty-five degrees left," Alec called, marking hisposition and a direction line in the crust with a pole. Each movedtowards the other and from the mid-point of their two