The pillow in place, Alec again climbed from the chasm and was locking on his skis when Troy slid up. The ice-dry snow was driving almost horizontally across the face of the ridge 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."