 Why is it ironic that the narrator's wife is asking him to be quiet during the broadcast?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The only kind of gag worth pulling, I always maintained, was a cosmic one—till I learned the Cosmos has a really nasty sense of humor! I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her rollerskates banging at her side. I unlocked the door, held it against her pushing and slipped out so that, for all her peering, she could see nothing. Volplas at last. Yet I had always been so sure I could create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No, twelve. I glanced across the animal room to where old Nijinsky thrust his graying head from a cage. I had called them volplas since the day old Nijinsky's elongated arms and his cousin's lateral skin folds had given me the idea of a flying mutant. When Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella about his cage. "Tell your mother that I retaliate. She skated awkwardly between the rows of cages from which mutants with brown fur and blue fur, too much and too little fur, enormously long and ridiculously short arms, stared at her with simian, canine or rodent faces. Again in the laboratory, I entered the metabolic accelerator and withdrew the intravenous needles from my first volplas. The accelerator had forced them almost to adulthood in less than a month. It would be several hours before they would begin to move, to learn to feed and play, perhaps to learn to fly. Meanwhile, it was clear that here was no war of dominant mutations. My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching the knob while calling. I flipped a hamburger and a slice of onion onto a plate and picked up the ketchup and said, "I've reached the dangerous age." I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and said aloud, "Yes, sir, the dangerous age. I kissed her until I heard rollerskates coming across the terrace from one direction and a horse galloping toward the terrace from the other direction. Our son reared the new palomino I had just bought him for his fourteenth birthday and yelled down, "Unhand that maiden, Burrhead, or I'll give you lead poisoning." My wife brought me a bowl of salad and I munched the hamburger and watched the boy unsaddle the horse and slap it away to the pasture.
 She has been giving him alcohol, which could have been adding to the talkativeness
 She has been giving him alcohol, which could have been adding to the talkativeness  She is talking more than he is, so the effort is misplaced  He is usually fairly quiet, and this is unusual behavior for him  He is being supportive of his friend for once and should be encouraged