 Why is it ironic that the narrator's wife refers to him as Zeus?
[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! 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. 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 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. 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 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." My Hera, you're properly married to Zeus. 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.
 He seems to think he's very important, and about as powerful
 The area they live in is compared to the Roman countryside, not anything Greek  He seems to think he's very important, and about as powerful  He identifies more closely with different figures in Greek mythology  She thinks he has too many children, similar to Zeus