You could boot via floppy and install a USB device for free on your own...

http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm

Please keep in mind that DOS USB CDrom/HDD/zip/etc. drivers is a brand new and developing area so there is no one single method that is guaranteed to work on every PC. If you try a few methods and have no luck, keep at it and dont worry as I'm confident there is enough information here to get at least 99% of the USB drives to work in dos.
They have no images for you to built off, but they provide examples of what you have to do in your autoexec.bat and config.sys.

So you DL one of the bootdisks, Win98SE is a safe bet and also DL the USB drivers they provide for any of the 4 methods they outline. Put those drivers on the bootdisk and make the appropriate changes to your autoexec.bat and config.sys as they outlined in the above link.

Cross your fingers put the boot floppy in your laptop and good luck.

Let us know how it works out.

This will not autoboot your CD, but it will give you USB CD/DVD drive access and assign it a drive letter.

You'll still have to install via WINNT.EXE.