Jungle Juice High

Jungle Juice High

By Lyle R. Amlin

‘Jungle Juice’ has been around for a long time, but there is a different kind of high

After The Orange shell was completed in '20, most of the construction guys on Luna went back to Earth. Uncle Mark and I signed on for another tour. Mark said he liked the money, but I just wanted to stay on Luna...although I admit that the money was really good and was starting to stack up the interest back in Sacramento.

George Wilson, the project director, remained and Gale was one of the 30 or so people who shipped in to get the Orange cooking.

At that time “Lunar City” consisted of just the Orange dome and the electric atomic power reactor and there was plenty yet for us ordinary grunts to do. We had to build all of the floors inside the Orange, run the water, power and reclamation lines and install just about everything needed for the expected occupants.

You see, Luna Corp planned on leasing space in the Orange to a whole lot of Earthie companies which wanted to do low-gravity or vacuum research, private exploration outfits or anyone else who had the cash and needed more space than that provided on the original “International Space Station.”

Luna Corp collected Earth-Luna lift charges, rented space, and charged them for water, power, recycling, air and meals. What a deal...the company made money on everything.

When we had finished the Orange, we started building “The Farm” -- the hydroponic farm. Well, that’s what we called it, the official name was something like “Lunar Hydroponics Farm and Oxygen Reclamation Unit”, LHF & ORU.

The Farm building was easy -- just like we did with the Orange. First we dug a trench about 10 meters wide and 50 long, poured a plasto-concrete slab and erected a pre-fab shell that looked just like an old Quonset hut out of World War II. Then we back-filled completely over the hut and hooked up an air lock. The Farm started off with imported water from Earth and the plants recycled the old air from the Orange. Later on, water reclaimed from water-rich Lunar rocks by the still was also run through the farm and the other farms that were built the next year.

The first plants they put in looked like pond scum. The Japanese who ran The Farm said they were best at cleaning the air and then turned into food, but the processed scumtasted like...well, overcooked rice. A few months later we had our first tomatoes, green onions, squash and even watermelon (which was just in time for July Fourth).

July Fourth? Why that was the annual celebration of the founding of the United States...an important event back then.

When The Farm was really humming it not only supplied air and vegetables for us Loonies, but the company sold the produce to NASA's Essy, the Earth orbit Space Station, the predecessor to The Wheel...and at a good profit. Even then it was cheaper to lift stuff from Luna to Earth orbit than directly from Earth and you probably know from school how much Luna collects from selling food, water, oxy, hydrogen, metals and other stuff we sell to both The Wheel and Earth.

After the farm was turned over to the Japanese, we started building the water vac still. Nearby we had located some rocks that had water chemically bonded inside them. It wasn't a lot of water, as I remember it was something like 1.5% water by weight, but that was enough. The rocks were crushed in a stamp mill and then heated. The water was driven off and condensed out in a vacuum still. I think at first the plant turned out about 100 gallons of water in a shift...I know that it created a lot of old crushed rock that soon made a brand new Lunar mountain. Most of the water we used right here on Luna, but we sold enough to Essy to pay for the entire still.

The only sealed part of the still was the control building...everything else was done in vacuum, except the water reservoir. It had to be inside or the water would have frozen at night and evaporated in the daytime.

The Farm and the water still took about three months to build and when we had started on the hydro-oxy cracker Uncle Mark and I took off a couple of days for R&R. We sat around our room, drinking coffee from the mess (at $5 a cup) and groused about how we’d sure like a beer. Alcohol was not allowed on Luna by the company. Not that it was trying to stop us from drinking booze, but the official line was it was too expensive to lift up from Earth.

Anyway, about 2 am and a zillion cups of coffee later, the two of us decided it would be nice to have a beer every so often and we decided to do a little construction on our own.

A couple of weeks before one of the landers had been wrecked about a quarter-mile away. It wasn't badly wrecked, one of the landing legs had collapsed, the fuel tank had ruptured and the pilot and co-pilot were only hurt slightly (I think it was a bump on the head for one and a bloody nose for the other). We had off-loaded the cargo (fertilizer for The Farm, some electronics equipment for a computer research company and other stuff I don't remember) and the lander was just sitting there blistering in the sun and freezing at night...just waiting for someone to borrow it.

I know, the company was the owner, but we figured as long as it wasn't needed we might as well use it. Anyway, Uncle Mark and I removed the airlock and welded it to an old supply container near the reactor. The container had been discarded because someone had dropped it during unloading and it was badly dented on one end and had a hairline crack.

A little welding fixed it up as good as new and when we were finished we had an airtight shop five meters long by two round. When we pressurized the shop we found that it got pretty hot inside during the day, so we rigged a piece of aluminumized plastic sheeting for an awning and that brought the temperature down to livable.

Nobody noticed anything...Mark and I did a lot of work outside all of the time and since I was section boss at the time no one really kept track of what we did and when we did it. Director Wilson only cared about keeping on schedule with the various projects and as long as we were on schedule he didn't say anything.

We liberated a couple of filled air tanks, two 55-gallon drums (one plastic and one metal), a few plastic pails, a coil of stainless steel tubing and traded a bag of sugar and corn meal from the mess hall cook. What'd we trade? Wait a minute and I'll tell you -- but you can probably guess.

The sugar and corn meal were mixed with water and fermented...and that made beer. Tasted terrible, but we distilled the alcohol out and mixed it with grape juice we purchased at the company store. The result was what we called "Loony Jungle Juice"...and that's what we traded back to the cook.

Why did we call it "jungle juice"? Well, a long time ago back on Earth, navy men, the old water navy that is, traditionally did the same thing we were doing aboard their ships. They called theirs "jungle juice" and it just seemed natural for us to do the same thing.

See, back on Earth most navies, alcohol wasn't allowed. Now alcohol of one sort of another has been demanded by men ever since the ancient Egyptians. And if it's not allowed...why then there's always somebody who will make it anyway. We figured it might as well be us.

We did the old water-navy jungle juice one better...we had Gale run off some labels on a copier and glued them to the plastic bottles.

Yeah, yeah, we sold it. We had to be careful, though. Technically it was illegal, but most everyone on Luna was a customer and we got a pretty good price for it. I think that Director Wilson knew who was making it, but as long as there weren't any problems he just looked the other way.

Officially there wasn't any alcohol on Luna.

Unofficially it was everywhere.

Things settled down to routine again. We did our jobs, finished the oxy-hydro cracker and tinkered with our still to increase production.

When the cracker was completed the company now had tanked oxygen and hydrogen to use on Luna and still had a surplus to sell Essy.

A lot of the second crew left, but we had all sorts of scientists and prospectors arrive. Seiman Labs came up to do research on low-gravity serums, Kaiser Steel arrived to do prospecting for iron (it was a lot later when and where they found it, but that's another story) and we had a whole slew of two-man outfits arrive with a wide variety of money-making ideas.) As I remember, the population of The Orange was about 220.

"Loony Jungle Juice" sold even better and we stepped up production. We quadrupled the space of the shop, tapped into and purchased power from Luna Corp's power grid, and hired a young guy named Brickey to run the shop. Officially the power was being sold to "Wise Industrial Neat Enterprises." We incorporated that name and began filing income tax reports on it...all nice and legal.

Mark had decided to take a six-month leave back on Earth but I stayed on and was out working with a new crew constructing a third Farm building, it was right after Lunar midnight, (just about four days into the Lunar night with three days to sunrise) when I realized that Radio Cap was sounding rather urgent.

You have to remember that back then every suit and complex was on one frequency. No, we didn’t have cell phones there, no towers had been constructed. The outside work crews usually managed to ignore the constant chatter between Radio Cap, the outlying buildings and the 'cats in the field. When my crew needed to talk to each other we switched off the radios and did a direct head-to-head sound talk. Anyway, Radio Cap was trying to reach a 'cat which had been leased to Kaiser Steel for exploration work.

It had left four days before on a planned three-day trip and hadn't been heard from since. For a 'cat to be out of radio reach wasn't unusual, radio waves travel in straight lines and once you get beyond 20 kilometers from The Orange you usually were out of range.

It's not even unusual for a 'cat to be overdue. That used to happen all the time back in the beginning, but in this case the problem was that the Kaiser 'cat had only enough oxygen for it's crew for five days.

Obviously, the 'cat and it's crew were in trouble. They had broken down, or worse, and nobody knew where they had gone.

If a Lunar shuttle had been scheduled to take off it probably could reach them on its upward climb, but the only shuttle around had just landed and wouldn't be ready to lift for 40 hours. By that time we could write the 'cat and the crew off.

Essy tried to reach them, but since the 'cat had a low-power radio even if they heard the transmission they probably couldn't get a message back to her.

They were in really bad shape. Somehow we needed to get a radio high enough to reach over whatever was between them and us. Once we found where they were we could get a rescue 'cat to them in time...or if not in time to rescue them alive, we could bring the 'cat back...those babies were expensive and we needed all we had.

"Gale," I said an hour later over a dinner of fresh tomatoes, lettuce and onions...and a glass of aged Jungle Juice, "I think I know how to do it."

"Sure," Gale said, "just throw a rope up into the sky, climb up it and look around, right?"

"Well, almost like that, but here's the idea" and I laid it out.

Gale said it could work and went to Radio Cap to talk to them and I suited up and went to the shop. One the way I stopped and got Brickey and we went to work.

Just that morning Brickey had distilled a really large batch of alcohol, but he hadn't added the grape juice to it yet...and that was perfect. We took an old oxygen tank and poured the alcohol into it, then pressurized it with some oxygen. We took another oxygen tank, this one full, and strapped the two to a third tank. The third tank we cut off most of the neck, leaving enough so the throttled-down area was about one inch across.

Then we hooked up some stainless steel tubing to the tanks and fed them through two holes at the bottom of the tank. Right about then Gale arrived with a transponder box from Radio Cap.

"They think the idea is crazy," Gale said, "but it only took one bottle for them to decide they could spare the transponder."

"Test the battery, Gale, and Brick and I'll weld it on," I said.

What we ended up with was one cutoff tank welded in between two other tanks--one oxygen and the other alcohol--with the transponder on top. We hauled it outside, ran a 220-volt wire to the nozzle, and stripped the wires back about three inches and bent them a hair's breadth apart.

I tongued my radio on "Radio Cap, this is Don, we're ready, are you?"

"Go ahead, Don," Cap said, "as soon as we have it in sight we'll begin transmitting."

"OK," I answered, "I'll tell you when it's lit, should be just a couple of minutes."

We set the tanks up against a rock in a near vertical attitude, Brick had an aluminum pole he used to flip open the valves to the oxy and alky tanks and when he did so I hit the juice to the electrical line and jiggled it.

The 220 lines touched and sparked and the oxygen and alcohol flamed to life. The little rocket lifted slowly. "It's lit and rising, Cap," I said as the rocket accelerated.

"Got it!" yelled Radio Cap, and the rocket got smaller and smaller as it rose into the utterly black sky.

It took about thirty seconds before Radio Cap made contact with the Kaiser guys, and about 10 seconds for them to give their location and problem.

Turned out they had thrown a tread while they were in a fairly deep channel and there was no way to get to the tread to fix it...without our rocket they would have been cold meat in about 12 hours.

It only took a rescue 'cat about three hours to reach them and get them out to safety, but it took our guys five days to pull the 'cat out, fix it and get it back to The Orange.

The Kaiser guys looked us up immediately on getting back and insisted on getting us high...on jungle juice, of course...and that felt pretty good.

What felt just as good was the reward check Kaiser wrote out to us for the rescue...you have no idea what it would have cost them to replace the 'cat and send a couple of more guys to Luna to finish out their exploration.

But one thing has always bothered me. For a long time I looked and looked but never found it...so where did that damn rocket land?



"A Lunar Tan" 

"Jungle Juice High" 

"The Iron Midden" 

"Made On The Moon" 

"Cow Who Jumped On The Moon" 

"Gunfight at the Paris Corral" 

"The Long John Space Suit"