 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. 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. 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. 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. Outside this little town, I found a litter of flat stones that had young black-snakes under each slab. 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. Suddenly, as I teased the male volpla, this happened. As they swept out and forward, the lateral skin that had, till now, hung in resting folds was tightened in a golden plane that stretched from the tip of the spar to his waist and continued four inches wide down his legs to where it anchored at the little toe. By four o'clock that afternoon, I was feeding them solid food and, with the spars closed, they were holding little cups and drinking water from them in a most humanlike way. The shoulder girdle and pectoral muscles were heavy and out of proportion, of course, yet the females had only one pair of breasts. I would invent a euphonious set of words to match the Basic English vocabulary and teach it to them as their language. I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first white men enter these hills. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before anyone suspected. One day, somebody would see a volpla.
 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