s 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.

There was water in the highlands, in watersheds and spilling unused
down to the sea in many areas. Soon the cities and industries sent out
great plastisteel arteries to bring the lifeblood of the land to the
vast sponges of the factories and showers in home and food-processing
plants and landrounits. Water for the machine-precise rows of soy bean
plants and for babies' formulas and water for great nuclear power
plants and water for a tiny, sixty-fifth floor apartment flower box.

But there was never enough and a nation finally could no longer evade
the situation that had been forewarned and foredoomed a century
earlier by the pioneers of conservation.

Only by total conservation of every possible drop of moisture could
the nation survive, and to conserve, it is first necessary to have an
accurate and constantly-current inventory of the substance that is to
be conserved.

To the executive branch of the government had come the Secretary of
Water Resources, and with the creation of the new cabinet office, the
former cabinet posts of Agriculture and Interior were relegated to
subordinate and divisional status.

To the thousands upon thousands of trained hydrologists,
meteorologists and agronomists of the federal agencies of
agriculture, interior and commerce fell the task of manipulating and
guiding the delicate balance of the world's water cycle. The snows and
rains fell upon the earth, to soak into the land, flow down the
streams and rivers to the sea or to the great lakes, and then be
returned to the atmosphere to fall again in the ageless cycle of life.

But the happenstance habits of nature were steadily being integrated
into the control program of man. The rains and snow still fell where
nature intended but man was now there to gauge and guide the moisture
in a carefully controlled path through its cycle back to the
atmosphere.

An inch or an acre-foot of water falling as snow upon the high
mountains was used over and over many times and by many persons before
returning to its starting place in the atmosphere.

With the age of n