"I didn't expect you two back so soon," he said with a scowl. "What's the matter? Couldn't you get to the gauge?"
Alec laid the faulty device on Wildon's desk. "No trouble, boss. Just speedy work by your best juniors."
Wilson snorted. "You must have had the chopper land you on the ridge in spite of orders." He reached for the gauge. Troy and Alec exchanged smiles. The old man had received a full report of the conditions in the Sawtooths together with a check on their activities at least an hour ago. He knew what they had to contend with to switch the gauge—and he knew they knew he was just barking.
"Another one of the transmitters shot again," he muttered. Wilson punched the intercom on his desk. "Shiver," he called, "get up here and get this radiation gauge you said was so good."
In the communications repair section three levels underground, the senior comm tech snapped out a fast "yessir" and bolted for the door.
"What did you leave up there?" Wilson asked.
"We put a CS gauge thirty feet from the survey point," Troy said. "It was working fine and it's on a flat shelf with virtually the same pack and strata formation this one came out of."
"What's it look like up there," Wilson asked. The supervisor was nearing the end of forty years of service with Snow Hydrology and in his early days, the last vestiges of the crude "man-on-the-spot" surveys were still in operation.
Despite loud and emphatic defense and reliance on the new and complex techniques of electronic measurements, he still felt the need to feel the texture of the snows himself and to observe with his own eyes the sweep of the snow pack molded against the shoulder of a towering crag. Chained to the desk by responsibility, he used the eyes of his junior engineers and surveyors to keep a semblance of the "seat of the pants" technique of forecasting that he had lived with and lived by.
"The pack is good," Alec reported, "and what we saw of the south slopes is holding well. It was snowing from the time we got into the area until we pulled out this morning, so we didn't really get a long sighting. But what we saw looked fine."