 Why was the Volpla vocabulary limited when the narrator took a few into the valley?
Yet I had always been so sure I could create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. 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. Suddenly, as I teased the male volpla, this happened. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before anyone suspected. Linguists would observe at close quarters and learn the simple volpla language. Volpla wisdom would become a cult—and of all forms of comedy, cults, I think, are the funniest. A 'copter sidled over the ridge, then came just above the oak woods toward us.
 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