“Me no go!” Ti Nih announced. “Me like him bed. Soft, warm, fill with much Putnam man.”
“Ahh,” Putnam purred. “That’s very relaxing, Ti Nih. That’s it. Now a little to the left. Down a little . . .”
“Putnam! This is no time to have that Tibetan Lolita scratch your back!”
“That’s what you think. Ahh, that is good! . . . Well, it’s been nice hearing from you, Steve. Call me again some time.”
“Putnam! Putnam!” It was no use. There was no response from the wrist radio. He’d hung up.
I was still brooding over the conversation when Denise returned. She jumped to the conclusion that what was bothering me was what she had lovingly labeled my “genital kaleidoscope.” I didn’t bother to enlighten her.
“I’ve bought something that might help,” she told me. “I thought about it, and I decided that it’s like a sore tooth. What I mean is, you pay too much attention to it. You keep checking to see what color it is, and thinking about it, and that only aggravates the condition. So I came up with this idea . . .”
She’d bought a spray can of gold leaf paint and the idea was to gild me. Denise’s theory was that if it was covered so I couldn’t see it changing colors, I wouldn’t brood over it so much and the condition might pass. I told myself it seemed a psychologically valid idea, comforted myself with the thought that I was only being gilded, not gelded, and finally told her to go ahead and express her artistic impulse.
Denise wasn’t too neat about it. By the time she got through, my groin was a sparkling gold, but so were other patches of skin around my body, and so was much of Denise as well. She cautioned me to let it dry before attempting to clean the areas inadvertently gold-spattered, and then went into the bathroom to take a shower herself. I lay naked on the bed hoping the air would hasten the drying process.
After a while, I got up. The shower was still running. Denise must be having a rough time getting the paint off, I reflected. Bored, I decided to look at the afternoon paper.
As I slid off the bed to fetch it, the floor came up cold against the bottoms of my feet. Denise’s slippers, a pair of very fancy pink fur mules with purple pom-poms, were right beside the bed. I slipped my feet into them and walked to the door of the apartment to see if the paper had been delivered.
It had, but the damned delivery boy had been sloppy about it. Two of the sections lay a few feet from the doormat, out in the hallway. I looked up and down the hall. It was empty. I darted out to pick up the wayward sections of the newspaper. My foot caught on the apartment door as I went and I stumbled forward. The door swung shut behind me.
I recovered my balance, grabbed the paper, and swung around to turn the doorknob. The doorknob didn’t turn! I tried again. No soap! The door had locked behind me.
I stood there in Denise’s pink slippers with their purple pom-poms and cursed. I stood there naked with my golden attributes hanging and stuck one finger on the doorbell while I pounded on the door with my other hand. Then I stopped and listened. My only reward was the sound of the running shower. I realized that Denise couldn’t hear me over the noise of the rushing water.
Suddenly, from down the hall, I heard the sound of a door opening and of voices bracing each other farewell. Not knowing what else to do, I dived for the elevator and pushed the button. There was still a modicum of luck left to me. The elevator was right at the penthouse floor. The doors slid open immediately and l plunged inside. I pushed the button to close them again before whoever was leaving that other apartment could join me in the elevator.
My predicament had me rattled. Obviously, I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I pressed the button for the lobby floor, an action prompted by two muddy reasons. Firstly, I wanted to get the elevator off my floor before that other party could open the door by pressing the button on the wall outside. Secondly, it occurred to me that I might be able to reach the lobby and attract the attention of the doorman there. He had a duplicate key to my apartment and I figured I could go down and up without anybody seeing me.
I figured wrong. I was just congratulating myself on the rapid descent of the elevator when it slid smoothly to a halt. The doors opened. Four people got on, two men and two women.
“Lobby?” one of the men said in a friendly tone, looking directly into my face.
I could only nod.
Once again the elevator started downward. The man was an American diplomat type in evening dress. Now, casually, his eyes dropped. They bounced back up, startled, and looked into my face again. They stared at me like twin question marks.
“It’s cooler,” I said weakly.
Immediately, I was sorry I’d spoken. Now the man’s three companions took notice of me. One of the women, a dowager with blue-gray hair, fastened on the frilly pink and purple slippers I was wearing. She gasped audibly. Her eyes met mine, dropped, and then she gasped again—even louder this time.
“It must be a masquerade party,” the other woman whispered to her.
“Must be,” the second man agreed. “That gold thing he’s wearing couldn’t be for anything else. What’s it supposed to be anyway?”
“Should I ask him?” the first man suggested.
“Don’t you dare!” the dowager hissed. “Whatever it is, it’s disgusting!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” the other lady murmured. “It has a certain fascination.”
“It must be new,” the second man observed. “You can still smell the paint.”
“Stop whispering!” the dowager commanded. “Just ignore him!”
We rode the rest of the way down in silence. The palms of my hands were slippery as I tried to keep them clasped in front of me. The sweat was pouring off my forehead too. I’d never been ignored so ostentatiously and intensely in my life. I really had to admire the way they worked at it once they’d decided that was the thing to do.
After an eternity, the elevator finally hit the lobby. Just in time. Another moment, and I think my nerves might have cracked. I might have succumbed to one or another of the crazy impulses which had seized me. I might have broken out into a wild dance, or thumbed my nose at the dowager, or seized one of the pink slippers between my teeth and made growling noises right in their faces. But I was saved by the doors sliding open.
I threw politeness to the winds and darted from the elevator. My knees were weak and so I leaped behind a drapery in the lobby and sat down. I had to have time to pull myself together. So, as 1 said, I sat down.
I sat down right on-top of a dinosaur egg!
CHAPTER TWO
The thing about dinosaur eggs is that you’re not really likely to recognize one even if you happen to be perched on it. What I mean is, if you’ve never seen a dinosaur egg before, it looks like a smooth, grayish, oval-shaped rock. If there happen to be a lot of other rocks around, you’re not likely to make the distinction immediately. Not unless you happen to be an expert on ova.
I was no expert. I had a nodding acquaintance with chicken eggs and could usually spot one without any trouble -- particularly if it was fried sunnyside up and framed with sizzling bacon. But dinosaur eggs? Well, I can’t remember their ever having been on the menu at Bickford’s. I never would have guessed that’s what I was sitting on, until -
Until the dinosaur came along!
They say that when a novice hunter faces his first charging lion, it’s not unusual for him to display buck fever. This malady is expressed by the hunter freezing, becoming incapable of movement, even of such a simple movement as pulling the trigger. The obvious conclusion is that fear has immobilized him.
I don’t know about lions, but where dinosaurs are concerned, the obvious conclusion is erroneous. The sight of a charging dinosaur filled me with fear all right, but the fear didn’t paralyze me. On the contrary, it had the effect of an unexpected thumbtack jabbed into my posterior. One look and I leaped like a kangaroo high on pep pills and raced for a grove of trees a little distance away like the grove was home base in a game of ringalevio9 and Herr Dino was the neighborhood bully trying to tag me with a broken beer bottle. Like my shrink used to say: “When you have a roving anxiety complex, it attaches itself to whatever is handy.” The dino was handy. Too handy!