 How were the Volpla able to eat solid food so quickly?
Volpla By WYMAN GUIN Illustrated by [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! There were three of them. Dozens of limp little mutants that would have sent an academic zoologist into hysterics lay there in the metabolic accelerator. But there were three of them . 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. She twisted the knob violently, trying to hit a combination that would work. I unlocked the door, held it against her pushing and slipped out so that, for all her peering, she could see nothing. "Daddy, I've tried and tried and I just can't turn this old key tight enough." "You can't turn this old key tightly enough." "All right, wench. I got down and shoved one saddle shoe into a skate. I strapped her ankle and pretended to use the key to tighten the clamp. Volplas at last. 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 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. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the cage. I lifted her out of the chair and stood her on her skates. "Tell your mother that I retaliate.
 Their growth had been artificially sped up, so they passed the stages where they would have needed different food
 Their anatomy is not human, and their more developed digestive system handles solid food much earlier  They mature very quickly, as a result of their mutant status, so it would be easy to eat anything  Their growth had been artificially sped up, so they passed the stages where they would have needed different food  Solid food was the only thing they were offered, so they learned to eat it