 What university is the narrator affiliated with?
[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! I closed the accelerator and walked across to the laboratory door. 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 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. Except for the face, chest and belly, they were covered with a soft, almost golden down. The cranium was in the same proportion to the body as it is in the human. No longer jointed like a finger, the spar turned backward sharply and ran alongside the wrist almost to the elbow. 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. This was by far the most impressive plane that had appeared till now. The shoulder girdle and pectoral muscles were heavy and out of proportion, of course, yet the females had only one pair of breasts. I was kneeling on the mattress, cuffing and roughing the male as one might a puppy dog, when one of the females playfully climbed up my back. It pulled Guy up to Cloud Nine and he wants to celebrate." 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.
 California Institute of Technology
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