That wasn’t going to be easy. You see, there was no logical explanation. From here on, everything about what happened just becomes more and more illogical.
In a nutshell—-In Tibet I met a little sexpot named Ti Nih Baapuh whose father was an inventor. Whilst I was compiling data on the local sex picture with Ti Nih, her father came home and I’d had to grab my pants and hide. Papa Baapuh, it seemed, was not a permissive parent where kanoodling was concerned. Unfortunately, I’d hidden on the platform of one of his most recent inventions. This was a time machine which he’d never gotten to work. Alas, while I was hiding there, Papa Baapuh inadvertently crossed some wires leading to a washing machine (which he’d also invented) with some other wires leading to the time machine, and the next thing I knew I was having dinner with the Queen of Sheba back in 950 B.C. or thereabouts.
Well, I warned you that you’d have to suspend disbelief. Like the Bard said, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth . . .” and all that jazz. If it helps dispel your sense of disorientation, remember how ridiculous the plant-hopping of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon4 used to be, and then pick up today’s paper and glom onto the latest news about our astronauts. Then look out the window at all the Dale Ardens and Wilmas5 sashaying around in Space Age miniskirts, and ask yourself the following:
Why not Santa Claus? Why not leprechauns and gremlins? Why not telepathy? Why not teletransportation? And then, why not time machines?
But don’t ask yourself why not cyclotrons6 ! From where (or is it when) I was sitting in Saigon, the answer only raised one more question-—the ultimate question: Why not total annihilation?
Anyway, I took the Time Machine Express back to Sheba, and then hopped a local going the other way and hopscotched the centuries, trying to get back to good Old 1967. I made it from ancient Rome to the Klondike of the early 1900s, but then I hit a snag. In one way, the snag was Charles Putnam.
While I was pogo-sticking over the panorama of history, Charles Putnam had gone to Tibet to pressure Papa Baapuh into hastening my return. However, about the same time I’d gotten bogged down in the Yukon, Putnam had fallen into the same trap which had started me on my trek in the first place. He’d succumbed to the allure of Ti Nih Baapuh, and he’d been caught with his State Department-CIA immunity down by her father. In his ire at Putnam, the Tibetan Galileo had slammed down a lever or something and I’d shot right past my time of origin and landed some time far in the future in Saigon. The last word from Putnam had been that Papa Baapuh hadn’t figured out yet how to work the time machine in reverse so that I could be transported from the future to the present. It was back to the old drawing board for the inventor, back to the sack with Ti Nih for Putnam, and back to nowhere for me for the time being. I was stuck in the future and I had to make the most of it.
Making the most of it didn’t stop me from callmg Putnam up frequently on my wrist radio to beg him to prod Papa Baapuh to greater efforts. So far, it had been to no avail. Between calls, I was managing to make a life for myself of sorts—of very bizarre sorts—in the Saigon of the future.
I couldn’t pinpoint the exact future time in which I now lived. All I knew was that some time between 1967 and Whenever it was, there had been an atomic debacle of some limited kind and people now dated everything from then. l’d landed in the year one fourteen, which meant one hundred and fourteen years after the holocaust, but whether that was a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years after 1967, there was no way for me to tell.
All of this, however, was overshadowed by one major change in the human condition which I’d been made aware of immediately following my arrival. This change stemmed from the overpopulation problem. The plan which was put into effect to cope with this problem was simple-—and practical—and devastating to contemplate!
All male babies were castrated at birth. All births were the result of artificial insemination. Thus the population was controlled. Thus male-female orgasm vanished from the world. Thus I found myself in a position some men might find enviable, and some might be able to appreciate was tiring, to say the least. Mine was the only penis on earth!
It took me a while to realize that the best of machinery can be worn out by overuse. It took me a while to realize because it took time before word of my endowments spread among the female population of Saigon. At first my services were limited to Denise Thang.
Denise was a luscious Vietnamese girl with a faint trace of French ancestry. She’d befriended me upon my arrival in Saigon. When she first saw my unique (in this time) male appurtenance, her curiosity had been greatly aroused as to its purpose. Action replaced words in explaining it to her, and we were soon lovcrs. Her demands grew greater with each “explanation.”
Still, there would have been no problem in meeting them if they had been confined exclusively to Denise. My problems started when Denise decided I was too good a thing to keep all to herself. Her first impulse was generous. She decided to share me with a few friends. Her next impulse was mercenary. She decided that I constituted a highly marketable luxury. And that was the start of the lines of women outside her shack. In short, Denise became my pimp!
Hell, I told myself, this was invaluable experience for the man from O.R.G.Y. What I told Denise, after a while, was something else again.
“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is pooped,” was the gist of my first mild complaint.
“Eat your oysters,” she replied.
I ate oysters until the mere thought of one was enough to make me gag. Then I put it to her more strongly. “My groin aches from overuse!” I announced.
“I’ll rub it with liniment for you,” she offered.
“Don’t touch me!” I practically screamed.
“Well, if you won’t let me help you, what can I do?” she asked logically.
“At least let me take a coffee break,” I pleaded.
“But there is no coffee. Because of the war. There’s only chicory.”
“Then I’ll drink chicory,” I agreed desperately.
“All right.” Denise humored me. “Would you like container-flavored chicory?” she asked.
“Huh? What’s that?”
“It’s an artificial flavoring for people who don’t like the taste of coffee, but dig the taste of the paper containers it comes in. I guess some people get addicted to container flavor. That way the chicory doesn’t taste so bad.”
Lewis Carroll lives! I told myself. Where else but at the Mad Hatter’s tea party7 could you get container-flavored chicory? “That’ll be fine,” I said aloud. “It’s the time to rest that’s important anyway, not the beverage.”
If I thought I’d made my point, I was mistaken. Denise really thought I was being temperamental and willful with my pleas for surcease from sex. She never really believed the simple truth, which was that each new performance was like being run through a phallic potato grater for me. My situation was godlike, and the particular pagan god I approximated was Norse to an extreme. What I mean is, I was Thor! I was so Thor I couldn’t even—- Well, you see what I mean.
It came to a climax (the situation, not me, not any more; I just wasn’t capable) on the particular night I described at the start of this narrative. It was during my chicory break, taken between an overly athletic Saigon laundress and an eager chorine back for seconds, that I noticed that my stock-in-trade had turned blue. It was a beautiful shade, like a cloudless sky at twilight, like the Mediterranean with the sun bouncing off it, like a star sapphire sparkling by starlight. And then, before my eyes, it changed from blue to green to red and back to blue again.