Volpla

When Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella about his cage. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the cage.

I turned to the fitting of my daughter's other skate.

"Daddy?"

"Yes?"

"Mother says you are eccentric. Is that true?"

"I'll speak to her about it."

"Don't you know?"

"Do you understand the word?"

"No."

I lifted her out of the chair and stood her on her skates. "Tell your mother that I retaliate. I say she is beautiful."

She skated awkwardly between the rows of cages from which mutants with brown fur and blue fur, too much and too little fur, enormously long and ridiculously short arms, stared at her with simian, canine or rodent faces. At the door to the outside, she turned perilously and waved.

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. Modulating alleles had smoothed the freakish into a beautiful pattern. These were no monsters blasted by the dosage of radiation into crippled structures. They were lovely, perfect little creatures.

My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching the knob while calling.

"Lunch, dear."

"Be right there."

She peeked too, as she had for fifteen years, but I blocked her view when I slipped out.

"Come on, you old hermit. I have a buffet on the terrace."

"Our daughter says I'm eccentric. Wonder how the devil she found out."

"From me, of course."

"But you love me just the same."

"I adore you." She stretched on tiptoe and put her arms over my shoulders and kissed me.

My wife did indeed have a delicious-looking buffet ready on the terrace. The maid was just setting down a warmer filled with hot hamburgers. I gave the maid a pinch and said, "Hello, baby."

My wife looked at me with a puzzled smile. "What on Earth's got into you?"