airie moose instead?"

"What's a prairie moose?" Scotty demanded.

"A field mouse with horns."

Scotty groaned. "All right, scientist. Let's get serious and see if you
can answer this one. We have an archeologist, a naturalist, and a
cyberneticist coming. I think I know what the first two are, but what in
the name of a blue baboon is a cyberneticist?"

Rick put the camera view finder into place and began to adjust it. "A
specialist in cybernetics," he said.

Scotty waved his arms. "Now I know!" he exclaimed triumphantly. "Any
idiot knows what cybernetics is. Or what they are. Ten cents apiece at
any hardware counter. No family should be without a handy-dandy
cybernetic!"

Rick chuckled. "All right. Cybernetics is a combined study of machines
and the human nervous system. It's trying to figure out how machines and
humans are related. I don't know much about it myself, but I do know
this: the big electronic calculators that do problems in a few hours
that it would take humans hundreds of years to finish were the result of
cybernetics."

"The big brains!" Scotty looked awed. "I've read about them. And to
think we're going to have that kind of expert here!"

"With his wife and two kids," Rick added. "I wonder how Huggins will
like a crowd of kids trampling through his garden!"

Scotty laughed outright. "Here we go again! Listen, Rick, start making
sense. How can twins less than a year old trample anyone's garden?"

Rick didn't try to answer. He finished the adjustment on the camera and
put it back on the shelf, then started to work replacing the lenses in
an old pair of sunglasses with the special ones he had ordered. After a
moment, he asked, "Scotty, how would you like it if an expedition left
Spindrift and we weren't with it?"

Scotty stared. "My sainted aunt! Is that's what's been bothering you?"

Rick admitted it. He knew where he stood with the old gang, Hartson
Brant, Hobart Zircon, Julius Weiss, and John Gordon. He was far from
sure of how the new staff members would look on him and Scotty. He had
learned that some scientists had little patience with people who were
unfamiliar with their special fields, and he and Scotty were pretty
ignorant about the new sciences that would be represented. That was his
only reason for objecting when his father had decided to enlarge the
staff.

"I can see it now," he said. "The Foundation will be planning an
expedition, maybe to be headed by this new naturalist, and