Cowboys and Dinosaurs - Chapter 10

10. The Lizard Lady

He lay back in bed - he had recently treated himself to a bed - and watched her sit, absolutely motionless in the golden sunshine, mouth open like a desert lizard's. She was an angular set of almost hairless incredibly long limbs, with virtually no breasts to speak of. Her tongue was a pink isosceles triangle, like one half of a snake's; it was out, tasting the air.

"Are you, uh, wearing a cap, or, erm, a sponge?"

Her mouth clapped shut like a crocodile's. "Of course not. The purpose of this is breeding. My eggs will be fertilized." Her tongue came out again.

"Oh god. We did it without -"

"Condoms, yes. A useful invention. They limit the number of mammals in the world. We have no use for them."

"Are you expecting to lay eggs?" he said.

"Don't be ridiculous. We give birth to live young, like ichthyosauri. We probably evolved some time after the Triassic." She held up a hand, and spread it. "The fingers are webbed; clear indication of an originally aquatic ancestor. I and ichthyosaurus no doubt have an ancestor in common."

Steve began mentally enumerating the number of sharp objects in his room, and calculating their distance from her. He was appalled to remember that he had only recently had his penis in her mouth, though he had not taken a picture. The penis had been controlling him at the time. It would have been its own stupid fault.

"You don't eat the male after mating", he said, "do you?"

"During, usually", she said distantly. "Once I give birth, the mammals will try to take the young away, of course. They always do."

Steve lifted up a pair of nail scissors resting in a heap of toenail clippings by the bed and moved them discreetly under the mattress. "Erm. How many times have they taken it away?"

"Twice now." She turned to him with a face as alien to irony as the Moon was to rainbows. "We must mate as many times as possible while I am in oestrus. After I am in oestrus I will lose interest in you."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"You will not be. As soon as I cease to ovulate, we will part company." She squeezed his hand. He was unsure whether this was affection or an attempt at tenderization. Immobile on the bed, he raced frantically through escape strategies in his head. "Er, you wouldn't be ceasing to ovulate any time soon, then."

"Not for a full month yet. I do not subscribe to the running dog mammalian menstrual cycle. You must be prepared for a programme of rigorous mating."

He grasped at conversational straws "So - how long have you known you were, um, an ichthyosaurus?"

"All my life. I was adopted by a troop of mammals after being abandoned as was right and proper by my true birth mother. My mammalian foster-parents disagree with me on this point, of course. I realized on coming of age that I did not bleed like other girls, and the mammal doctors told me my mammary glands would never produce milk, I realized then that I was a lone reptilian female in a world of upstart synapsids."

"Is it not possible", said Steve carefully, "that you might just have a hormone imbalance?"

The eyes flashed large. He was alarmed to note that the pupils were slightly elongated.

"NO." The tone of voice threatened toothmarks in his scrotum.

"...fair enough. Hey the, uh, mammal doctors suggested as much, perhaps?"

She sighed, sending a shiver of relaxation down her spine. "Yes. They provide me pills, which I flush down their mammalian toilet. The pills give me headaches. They are not suited to my brain. My brain has no neocortex. It is pure and smooth as an egg, with no placental convolutions. Their simian drugs will kill it."

"How do you know your brain is egg-shaped?"

"Because I am a reptile. The brains of all reptiles are unconvoluted, free of simian baggage. Although we sleep, we do not dream." She flicked at his penis disinterestedly with huge unpainted claws of fingernails. "You mimic the human male's inability to copulate continuously with great success."

"Ah, yes. I'm afraid it will be mimicking for some time." Permanently. Please, let it be permanently.

She sighed and rose in one breath-propelled movement. "You are no use to me. I will seek out members of my own sub-species." Layers of clothing began to go on, one after another.

"I'm not a member of your sub-species, then."

She looked down at him derisively. "Hardly. Do you look like me? You have a penis."

The logic was undeniable; he was forced to nod. "Do other members of your sub-species not have penises?"

"No, cloacas like myself. We mate cloaca-to-cloaca, continuously."

"And where do you meet them, these reptiles?"

"In gay bars, mostly. They resemble human lesbians. But I can tell the difference." She fastened the last toggle on her fur coat and frowned severely at him. "I will be back at four to receive more of your semen. Do not be late."

She swept through the door like a crocodile into water, and was gone.

Steve clapped his hands to his head, and began wringing his convoluted simian brain to make escape strategies come out.

"Oh god...how am I going to get out of this..."

***

"Doctor, I urgently need a male contraceptive pill. Many male contraceptive pills."

An eyebrow raised. The doctor scribbled an indecipherable note with a biro marked with the logo of a major pharmaceutical company.

"So, you're considering having sex, then."

"No, I just like the taste. Of course I'm considering having sex."

"There's no need to be like that, Mr...uh...Simpson." The doctor looked up from his notepad, which was marked with the logo of a major pharmaceutical company. "You know, I only ever tend to get these requests with regard to one particular person, a lady I will not name who is luckily not one of my other patients and therefore not covered by doctor-patient confidentiality." Doctor Vadera, known to his longest-standing patients as Dark Lord Vadera of the Sith, laid down his pen. "I'm aware of why you want the pills. You must understand they're still very much in the initial stages right now. You can always just say no to her, you know."

"I'm frightened she might do things to me."

The doctor's eyes bored into Steve's well-armoured conscience. "I rather think the problem is that she is already doing things to you. And that isn't exactly unpleasant, yes?"

Steve crossed his legs. "In a slightly scary way."

"Yes, I believe she is quite energetic. And utterly obsessed with having a child, which will, I am afraid, never happen. You see, she is a man."

Steve froze more completely than a caveman in a glacier.

"No menstruation, you see. She has interior testes. She also has ovaries, of course, and a womb of sorts, I believe it's all very crowded down there. I suppose, strictly speaking, I should call her an hermaphrodite. But if balls make a man, then she's a man."

Still, Steve sat quiet.

Then he punched the air and shouted: "YES!"

Doctor Vadera nodded. "That is Reaction Two, less common than Reaction One. Reaction One is My God, A Man? I Am Not Putting My Penis In There. Reaction Two is My God, A Beautiful Woman Who Wants Sex Constantly And Never Gets Pregnant. Both of them are morally suspect, you know."

"Morally suspect", said Steve, "is my middle name."

"It says here", said Doctor Vadera, studying his notes microscopically, "that it is Kermit."

Steve straightened defensively. "Kermit was a perfectly acceptable Biblical name in the 1970's."

"Until the arrival of the Muppets", said the doctor.

"Yes", said Steve with venom, gripping the arms of his seat. "The Muppets ruined everything."

"I can still provide you with the pills. Thrombopterox, twenty five milligrammes, twice a day. It is only fair to warn you that if you die of a thrombosis or other complaint five minutes after taking the product, the Pfister-Sauron Corporation are not responsible. It's written quite clearly on the bottom of the packet." He grinned. "No, actually, I'm joking, the product is actually quite unlike the female contraceptive pill."

Steve grabbed the prescription, which was written on specially printed prescription paper marked with the logo of a major pharmaceutical company.

"You really should be using a condom, you know", said the doctor. "There is no telling who else she might be sleeping with. Though it is quite uncommon for HIV to spread through vaginal intercourse, it could happen. Take my advice and do her up the back passage."

Steve nodded dumbly, still clutching his pills. The doctor smiled broadly. In the nightmare had Steve later that evening, his teeth were marked with the logo of a major pharmaceutical company.

***

"Ah, Mr. Simpson. I hope you've recovered from your illness."

Steve realized he had not coughed theatrically since entering the building. "Ah, yes, thanks."

The development workshop was full of oxyacetylene sparks. Two of the damaged McSweeney units were being taken apart, with infinite care, by technicians.

"Will McSweeneys let us do that?" said Steve.

"No", said Mr. Botham gleefully. He was wearing a dove-grey Stetson, neckerchief, and spurs. A badge on his chest actually said SHERRIFF. "The machines are leased. They can only be maintained by authorized McSweeney personnel. But as their maintenance slot is scheduled for Friday, we have time to tear down the machines, take a look at their innards, and put them back together again so no-one is the wiser. After all, the beating they've taken is sure to have popped the warranty seals."

A though occurred to Steve. "You didn't arrange for them to take a beating, did you?"

"Goodness gracious no. But it's a thought for the future." Mr. Botham watched like a fat businessman ogling a lapdancer as the gaudy plastic shell was lifted off the steel frame inside. "The cunning bastards. They copied our tilt switch design." Botham hunched his shoulders guiltily. "In actual fact, we copied our tilt switch design off the Nazis, but the thieving American devils have stole what we stole."

Steve watched the technicians tearing into the machine's carcass. "There were Nazi one-armed bandits."

"Oh, yes. Uncommon, but quite innovative. Your basic analogue single-payline one-armed bandit gets dreamed up in the States in the 1880's by a man called Fey. Like many American ideas - Coca-Cola and so on - the Nazis took it up enthusiastically, and many popular American designs were bought by the Wehrmacht to entertain the troops. After 1941, of course, there were no more American technicians to maintain the machines, and the Germans had to design their own. For this, they turned to a quite brilliant and quite, quite mad scientist called Klaus-Peter Affengeil, who had been rendered redundant by the cancellation of one of Hitler's more lunatic naval projects. Affengeil applied some of Nazi Germany's latest advances in encryption and naval ordnance computing into the randomization systems for the EiArmRäu 45 series of military slot machines. It was only the fact that the Allies captured Erfurt before the Russians that led to us having that technology instead of the communists." Mr. Botham's intense gravity left little doubt in Steve's mind that, had the communists obtained Nazi bandit technology first, world civilization would have been under threat.

Steve regarded the machinery around him with unease. "So modern-day slot machines were invented by Nazis?"

"Oh yes. The same thing happened with Coca-Cola. The Germans couldn't get Coke any more - or even its basic ingredients - after war broke out with America, so they were forced to change the formula, making Fanta, which is basically orange Nazi Coke."

Steve examined Botham for any trace of mendacity, but found none. Even so, he shook his head slowly.

"No. I'll believe you on the slot machines, but you've made up the stuff about Fanta."

Botham shrugged. "Suit yourself." He picked up a panel from one of the McSweeney machines, which depicted SS troopers clutching Schmeissers advancing through a war-blasted city with the legend BIG WINS! "This is a 2005 Stalingrad model, built by McSweeneys to commemorate the sixtieth year since the first EiArmRau 45. It pays out if you get three SS runes in a row, and double if you get three swastikas. Essentially the same randomization algorithms have been in use in these machines for six decades. They do say that if a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi plays on one, it pays out every time, and that this was Affengeil's gift to refugee Nazis after World War Two."

"Is this the 'they do say' that says if you have a Crying Boy in your house burns down, and that if you swallow chewing gum it sticks to your insides and kills you?"

"Very possibly. I have been all over these machines with a fine-toothed comb and have been able to find no trace of a Nazi sensor. An intriguing tilt switch, that's all. Closely based on the trigger mechanism for the SD2 Butterfly Bomb."

Steve squinted at a new, pristine machine standing in the Build area. "What's that?"

The machine was a standard B300 in new clothes; only the shell had been replaced. The shell bore the legend KING OF CRIME, and a stern-faced gangster surrounded by pneumatic molls and artillery-toting henchmen.

It was thirty full seconds before Steve realized what had bothered him about the machine. "It's Ronnie Dowd", he said, his skin going numb. "You've put Ronnie Dowd's face on a slot machine."

"We thought it was appropriate", said Botham, "given the current circumstances."

Steve swallowed a huge lump of utter terror. "Has he seen this?"

"We sent him a prototype machine only this afternoon, by courier. We wanted it to be a surprise."

"Oh my god." Steve inched away as if the machine itself were likely to attack him. "He's going to kill me, and then he's going to skin me. And then he's going to dance about in the skin."

"I'm sure he's a very reasonable man", said Mr. Botham, "who will appreciate such a lovely gesture." He looked down at his clipboard. "I was hoping you'd be in work today. We have a client visit pencilled in for you."

Steve nodded. "In Carlisle. That's why I'm here. That and the fact that I'll be forced to make lizard babies if I stay home."

Mr. Botham glossed over Steve's lizard babies as if they had not been mentioned. "None of the rest of the marketing team seem to want to do the Carlisle run. It's a long haul."

Steve shrugged woodenly. "It's only five hours. Um, and another five back."

"Excellent." Mr. Botham grinned and tossed over the keys to the Pool Car. "She's got a full tank. I had to leave her two streets down, in Ramilles Avenue."

Fear twisted Steve's innards. "Outside the site?"

"About two hundred yards off site, yes. Don't worry, I'm sure you'll find her."

"Her? It's a car, not a horse."

Mr. Botham looked at Steve sternly. "What would I do with a horse? We've been through this before, Steve."

Steve glowered at the floor. "I apologize."

"Apology accepted. You'd best be on your way."

Steve nodded and trudged off in the direction of the loading bay gate.