 Why did the narrator's wife react the way she did when she got home to see workmen at the house?
[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! Dozens of limp little mutants that would have sent an academic zoologist into hysterics lay there in the metabolic accelerator. I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her rollerskates banging at her side. I closed the accelerator and walked across to the laboratory door. I unlocked the door, held it against her pushing and slipped out so that, for all her peering, she could see nothing. Three of them. Yet I had always been so sure I could create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No, twelve. 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. "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. I carried their limp little forms out to a mattress in the lab, two girls and a boy. 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. Modulating alleles had smoothed the freakish into a beautiful pattern. My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching the knob while calling. She peeked too, as she had for fifteen years, but I blocked her view when I slipped out. The maid was just setting down a warmer filled with hot hamburgers. 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 kissed her until I heard rollerskates coming across the terrace from one direction and a horse galloping toward the terrace from the other direction. 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.
 He had shown no sign of actually reporting on his work, and she didn't know what this change meant
 The narrator had told her that he was going to expand his workspace to investigate different mutations  She was upset that it seemed like the narrator was giving up on his work by tearing down his laboratory space  She was hoping to convert the lab space into a room for the family when he was done, and didn't want it to be torn down  He had shown no sign of actually reporting on his work, and she didn't know what this change meant