 Why did the narrator decide not to mention the Volplas during Guy's broadcast?
Volpla By WYMAN GUIN Illustrated by [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956. 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 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 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. 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. I filled a pail with them and took them into town and dumped them on the walk in front of the movie just as Theda Bara's matinee let out. Even in the basically mutating colony, there had been a decidedly simian appearance in recent years, a long shift from the garbage-dump rats I had started with. Except for the face, chest and belly, they were covered with a soft, almost golden down. On their heads and across the shoulders of the male stood a shock of fur as soft as chinchilla. The cranium was in the same proportion to the body as it is in the human. The spars had been common to the basic colony for years and were the result of serial mutations effecting those greatly elongated fifth fingers that had first appeared in Nijinsky. No longer jointed like a finger, the spar turned backward sharply and ran alongside the wrist almost to the elbow. Suddenly, as I teased the male volpla, this happened.
 He wanted to keep the secret long term and it wouldn't have been worth it to give it away
 Nobody could hear him over the broadcast's high volume  He wanted to make sure Guy had his moment and didn't want to steal the spotlight  He wanted to brag to Guy later, when he showed him the Volplas in the lab afterwards for a more dramatic effect  He wanted to keep the secret long term and it wouldn't have been worth it to give it away