The door opened and Clare, a slim, beautiful, nineteen-year-old natural blonde, blinked her eyes in the sun, smiled brightly upon seeing Lewis standing in the doorway, and said, “Dad! Oh my God!!! I thought you were in New York!!!”
Clare gave her father a big hug. Lewis just stood there with his arms at his sides and said, “Grab your toothbrush. We’re going to Indonesia. I’ll buy you clothes when we get there.”
Clare, frowning, stepped back from her father and looked him straight in the eye. “I’m sorry Dad, but I can’t keep uprooting myself like this. I mean, what? I’ll cancel all my auditions, dump my boyfriend, and then I’ll come back to LA in three months and have to start over again from scratch? No way. I’d be happy to spend the day with you in LA and show you the sights, but I am not going to Indonesia.”
Lewis said, “Come on. I don’t have time to argue. Clare, I just learned that Linda is in Indonesia, and if she discovers the ebu gogo before I do...”
“What? Mom’s stealing your work? That bitch. Hold on.”
Clare ran off and returned a moment later talking into her phone. “No, I won’t be able to go out with you next weekend either.”
She held up her toothbrush with her free hand, smiled, and followed Lewis quickly across the street towards the waiting cab. Clare said calmly into the phone, “Well actually, we’re through," and hung up.
Lewis opened the door for her and as Clare climbed into the cab she gave her father a disapproving look and said, “You see what you made me do Dad? Brandon could have been the one!”
Less than an hour later Lewis and Clare sat in the soft, Corinthian leather seats of Lewis’s private jet, the Dare to Discover, with papers spread out on folding trays in front of them, while outside a fuel truck slowly filled the tanks. Clare, who had been tapping away at her laptop, paused to sip from a sixteen-ounce energy drink through a red lipstick-stained straw.
Lewis watched his daughter, thoughtfully. At nineteen, she had the enthusiasm for life of those who have lived long enough to experience life’s joys, but not its miseries.
When Clare got excited about something, she became even more hyper and talked even more rapidly than usual. Also, energy drinks made her a bit speedy. She said, “OK, so most of the scientists on this list look like total jerks, but there is one, Michael Stern, who I think you can work with. Get this! Over twenty years ago he wrote a paper called ‘The Descendants of Pongo Abelii.’ In the paper he argues that Homo sapiens evolved from orangutans, as opposed to chimpanzees.”
Lewis smiled, almost impressed. “But that’s absurd. Human beings evolved from chimpanzees. It’s an established fact. Humans and chimpanzees share ninety-nine percent of their DNA.”
“He accounts for that too. He writes that chimpanzees and humans share so much DNA because chimpanzees actually devolved from an isolated population of humans who reverted to apehood. The paper almost ruined his career, and he eventually had to recant it so he could get work.”
Clare slid her laptop over to her father so he could read the article. With a single finger, as if he wanted to touch the article as little as possible, he slid the laptop back over to his daughter and said, “I don’t need a fucking baby sitter.”
“No, Dad, listen to me. Do you remember last year when your book about the Lake Champlain monster came out? Everybody said, ‘Oh, he just made it up. He’s a billionaire so he must have given the publisher a lot of money and then they must have just taken the money and published the book without bothering to verify Lewis Dare’s findings.’”
“Yes. I remember. Those ignorant assholes. But then once they saw the giant scale I found they all shut up pretty fast.”
“Well, you can’t expect to get lucky twice in a row. If you bring a PhD along with you to verify your findings this time, the public will have to believe you. Look, I hate academia as much as you do. Those mother fuckers have ruined Western thought. But rules are rules. You need to bring a PhD and I’m telling you, this is your guy!”
Clare slid the laptop back over to Lewis and said, “Read the article. You’ll dig it. It’s totally weird.”
Lewis looked at the title page of the article with distaste and reluctantly began reading. About halfway through the article he looked up from the computer screen and exclaimed, “Clare, this is fascinating! It’s brilliant. Damn the scientific community for rejecting this.”
Just then the pilot’s voice came on through the intercom. “Refueling is complete, sir. Where would you like to go next?”
Lewis turned to his daughter. “Clare, where does Dr. Stern live?”
“London.”
Before long the Dare to Discover was flying eastward across the continental US towards the Atlantic Ocean.
Chapter 3
The Indonesian rainforest was in a constant state of dusk because of the canopy of leaves overhead that blocked out most of the light from the sun. Martin had thought that stepping from the forest into the cave would have been like stepping from dusk into darkness, but instead it was merely like stepping from dusk into a darker twilight.
The stone walls of the cave were covered with foot-long phosphorescent slugs that lit the interior with an eerie dark purple glow. Two ebu gogo in the front grabbed a slug each and used them to lead the way for the others.
More ebu gogo joined them, and with the tips of dozens of spears pressed up against the bodies of Martin and Amber, they forced them to march through the twisting caves deeper and deeper into the earth and then into a small cavern. There, the ebu gogo forced the trembling, terrified Amber up against a wall at spear point and a bunch of them made quick work cutting her clothes from her body with the stone tips of their spears, until she was dressed in nothing but her pith helmet and her boots. Three ebu gogo then climbed all over her body, inspecting her all over, as Amber screamed and screamed.
The three ebu gogo grabbed at Amber’s large, gravity-defying breasts with their little toddler-like hands, shook their heads, and said disappointedly, “Bee-bee. Ne bee-bee, ne.”
Then, the three ebu gogo poked her vagina through its bush of shiny red hair with their little toddler-like fingers, shook their heads, and said even more disappointedly, “Coo-coo. Ne coo-coo, ne.”
Amber sobbed as her entire body trembled. She was now too traumatized to scream.
The three ebu gogo stepped away from Amber. The ebu gogo leader said, “Doh tahr shak.”
The ebu gogo that had been addressed brought her spear arm back. Martin, seeing that the creature was about to hurl its spear right at Amber, dove and tackled the spear wielding ebu gogo before it could throw.
The ebu gogo then forced Martin to his feet and up against the wall with their spears and cut his clothes from his body as they had done to Amber, until he was naked except for his pith helmet and boots. Three ebu gogo climbed all over his body. They grabbed at his hard pectoral muscles with their little hands and said excitedly, “Che-che. Ya che-che, ya.”
Then they poked and flicked his penis with their little fingers and said even more excitedly, “Wa-wa. Ya wa-wa, ya.”
Then, in the dark purple glow of the cavern, dozens of ebu gogo pressed their tiny spears against Martin’s flesh and forced him to the ground. Martin’s eyes bulged with terror.
The ebu gogo leader dismounted her miniature elephant. Her breasts were even larger than the breasts of the other ebu gogo, and hung almost to her feet. She approached Martin and mounted him, resting the bottoms of her low-hanging breasts in two piles on his chest. His dick grew hard and she easily got it inside herself, and rode his cock with slow, rhythmic motions. The other ebu gogo continued to hold Martin to the ground at spear point. But soon the ones with the spears relaxed and stepped back. The fear had left Martin’s face and was replaced by a look of intense pleasure. It was obvious to these primitive creatures that Martin was enjoying what was happening.