I grinned. "Forgive me if I eat and run, dear. Something in the lab
can't wait."
The fact was that I had something more in the lab than I had bargained
for. I had aimed only at a gliding mammal a little more efficient than
the Dusky Glider of Australia, a marsupial. Even in the basically
mutating colony, there had been a decidedly simian appearance in recent
years, a long shift from the garbage-dump rats I had started with. But
my first volplas were shockingly humanoid.
They were also much faster than had been their predecessors in
organizing their nervous activity after the slumbrous explosion of
growth in the metabolic accelerator. When I returned to the lab, they
were already moving about on the mattress and the male was trying to
stand.
He was a little the larger and stood twenty-eight inches high. Except
for the face, chest and belly, they were covered with a soft, almost
golden down. Where it was bare of this golden fur, the skin was pink.
On their heads and across the shoulders of the male stood a shock of
fur as soft as chinchilla. The faces were appealingly humanoid, except
that the eyes were large and nocturnal. The cranium was in the same
proportion to the body as it is in the human.
* * * * *
When the male spread his arms, the span was forty-eight inches. I held
his arms out and tried to tease the spars open. They were not new. 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. No longer jointed like a finger,
the spar turned backward sharply and ran alongside the wrist almost to
the elbow. Powerful wrist muscles could snap it outward and forward.
Suddenly, as I teased the male volpla, this happened.
The spars added nine inches on each side to his span. 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.
It was a true gliding plane, perhaps even a soaring one. I felt a
thrill run along my back.
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. They were active, curious, playful and
decidedly amorous.
Their humanoid qualities were increasingly apparent. There was a lumbar
curvature and buttocks. The shoulder girdle and pectoral muscles were
heavy and out of proportion, of course, yet the females had only one
pair of breasts. The chin and jaw were humanlike instead of simian and
the dental equipment was appropriate to this structure. What this
portended was brought home to me with a shock.
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. I reached around and brought her over my shoulder and sat her
down. I stroked the soft fur on her head and said, "Hello, pretty one.
Hello."
The male watched me, grinning.