Part 2
What was that smell? Fermented loganberries? No, it was fermented pawpaw.
Tarzan woke from his deep slumber, swiping the flies from his face, and the baseball cap went flying across the treehouse he shared with Cheeta, a chimpanzee.
Tarzan had known Cheeta for as long as he could remember. He thought he knew everything about his best friend.
But he was wrong.
It started with the cap. A very old baseball cap, in fact. Dirty, battered and thoroughly insalubrious, it looked as though it had spent half a century being dragged behind elephants on the jungle floor.
Tarzan picked it up. He brushed away some of the dirt.
And froze.
NASA.
He stared at the cap. Then at Cheeta.
"Where did you get this?"
Cheeta said nothing.
"That's a NASA cap."
Cheeta put it back on proudly. Tarzan couldn't believe it.
For years, he had been searching for something. Something he had seen as a very small child.
No, not a cap.
A cap-sule.
He remembered standing in the middle of the jungle with his father, the 2nd Tarzan, and looking up as something silvery and suspended by three enormous tablecloths drifted down through the dusk sky.
A capsule.
It floated down through the trees and disappeared into the jungle. Tarzan never forgot it. He knew, even then, that it meant something.
His destiny.
For years he searched the jungle. Its ravines, rivers and mountains. The search consumed him, and he found himself crawling through places where no sensible human being would agreeably put their hands.
But nothing.
The capsule had vanished, he decided, probably under one of those huge bogs or quicksand pools in the North, he had reluctantly concluded.
Tarzan became depressed, eating wild boar in large quantities. Even Cheeta called him Tarzan, Lard of the Jungle.
Putting on weight with little reason to take back control of his physique, let alone a jungle kingdom, this Tarzan was about to return to civilisation and his mother, Lady Greystoke.
"I said, where did you get the NASA cap?" pushed Tarzan.
And now, standing in front of the chimpanzee he thought he knew so well, the casual banter between them was about to become a physical encounter.
The law of the jungle had returned to the negotiation table.
There would be no diplomacy. No compromise. No mediation.
But possibly biting and screaming.
Cheeta looked at him. Then looked away.
Tarzan's eyes narrowed.
"I'll tell you over a cup of tea," said the chimp.
With that, the tension popped like a cheap balloon at a kids' party as Tarzan took out his best crockery, and the two friends began plotting their new adventure to find the capsule.
Part 3