Chameleon Chaos Read Online Free PDF

wasn’t really aware of this—his eyes were fixed on the white glass shade. Chameleons have very good eyesight for reptiles, he remembered, hunting with stealth, using their excellent telescopic eyes. And now he used his excellent telescopic eyes on the light shade. He could climb across to it—but it might be dangerous. At least it wasn’t hot. The day was bright, and none of the lights were on. And now, tantalizingly, he could see something. Something round and shiny with a little blade of red rippling through it. It
was
the marble! He could see it clearly in the middle of the shade.

    Suddenly he realized he didn’t need to climb across. Josh lost no time—he opened his jaws and flung out an incredibly long, squishy, sticky tongue. It hurtled across into the light shade and stuck itself onto the marble—but as he snagged it back toward him, the marble caught on a bit of electrical wire that wound into the shade. It pinged away across the shallow glass box and, to his enormous frustration, just out of reach. He tried again, hurling his tongue as far as it would go—but he couldn’t reach. His amazingly long tongue was about half of his body length—but not long enough.
    Josh couldn’t bear to leave the marble up here. He was so close! He wrapped the end of his tail around the very edge of the frame and then tightly grasped the right-angled post with his back legs, while reaching out with his front legs (or arms). His strong hands gripped the edge of the shade, and it didn’t swing—it was held firmly by the metal strut. Using his tail to push his body across, Josh got himself safely onto the light shade. The marble lay in the far corner in a drift of dried-up insect body parts.
    A second later, with a heavy clunk, the glass sphere was in his mouth, stuck to his tongue. A couple of dried-up bluebottle heads were in there too. Josh wasn’t worried. For a chameleon, dried-up bluebottle heads were like dry roast peanuts. If he’d been in boy form, that would probably have freaked him out, though.

    A moment later, Josh was in boy form.
    And he was very freaked out.

Petty Potts stood in her lab, holding one small black and white mouse in her palm and staring at it crossly.
    â€œCome on, Hector! Look lively!” she chided. Hector stared back at her through beady black eyes. His whiskers twitched. He began to wash.
    â€œYou’re supposed to be a chameleon by now!” Petty complained. “The S.W.I.T.C.H. formula is correct. You S.W.I.T.C.H.ed yesterday! Although … now that I come to think about it, I did get called away to answer the phone when I first sprayed you … so I actually didn’t see precisely when you S.W.I.T.C.H.ed.” She pursed her lips and calculated. “It could have been anything up to twenty minutes by the time I gotoff the phone and came back to look … Hector! Pay attention!” Hector stopped washing and looked at Petty, his furry head on one side. He seemed unimpressed.
    â€œHow long did it take you to S.W.I.T.C.H.?” queried Petty, talking so close to the mouse that her breath made its poppy petal ears flicker. “Of course—you’re tiny and your heart beats around five hundred times a minute, compared to a human heart of around seventy beats per minute … so if it
did
take you twenty minutes to S.W.I.T.C.H., how long would it take Josh and Danny?”
    Petty put Hector on her shoulder and grabbed a pencil and paper. It was time for some calculation. Hector burrowed happily into Petty’s hair at the back of her neck while she did her working out. “Don’t poo down my collar!” she requested, scribbling at top speed. “Now—height and weight plus metabolic rate … Hmmm,” she concluded. “If my calculations are correct—and being as I’m a genius, they must be—then Josh and Danny may be having quite an interesting time at school today.Oh