 Why was the Volpla vocabulary limited when the narrator took a few into the valley?
Volpla By WYMAN GUIN Illustrated by [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956. I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her rollerskates banging at her side. Volplas at last. Yet I had always been so sure I could create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. 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. 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. I thought, "All this and three volplas, too." 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.
 They were encountering concepts that were unfamiliar from the lab environment
 They had not been alive long enough to learn enough English to communicate well  They were encountering concepts that were unfamiliar from the lab environment  They are not smart enough to have a fully developed language, no matter how hard they try  They were confusing their own language with English, having trouble keeping the languages separate