"The second night out of Marsport Farquarson came to my cabin—Johnny and I were bunking together then—and said he had a request to make. He'd been told, he said, that 'spacies' (I wish you could have heard him trying to use slang; it made you feel like there was a skin growing over your teeth)—that 'spacies' had a special drink they, ah, manufactured surreptitiously on certain occasions when they were in space. Its name he, ah, believed, was jet juice. Did we know anything about it? Could we furnish any information concerning it to him?"
McBream paused. His lips had drawn down in a sour grimace. It was obvious that he had become absorbed in memories as unpleasant as a dose of picrin would have been.
"And did you?" I prompted.
"To the everlasting discredit of our common sense, we did. Afterward, when Johnny and I talked it over, we couldn't understand what had got into us. It wasn't as though either of us liked him; and we knew perfectly well how the Old Man felt about jet juice on board his precious Tisiphone. We acted like a couple of girls from the satellites all overcome by the glamorous lights of the big space port. Farquarson must have hypnotized us with his fine emporium clothes and his lazy drawl. An' the worst of it was, it was a wonderful batch of juice.
"I don't think I ever made a tastier. It had some bilial berries and kono shoots in it I picked up in Aphrodition, and the usual assortment of Martian fungi and grains. Just before we'd left Terra I'd had an inspiration and I'd put in three mangosteens and a big piece of durian. They were to give it body and depth. Then of course we revved the mixture up with a bottle or two of soma and some cocla extract, and put it away to stew in a dark corner of the hold in free flight, away from the artigravs. It came out a kind of cloudy peach green, smooth as satin and warm and deep and rich. It was a wonderful batch.
"Johnny got a bottle from under his bunk, where he kept it inside his depilitating kit, and poured Farquarson a drink. The old yap tasted it and his eyebrows went up. 'Extraordinary!' said he. 'Ah—could I have some more?'
"From first to last he finished two and three-quarter bottles of the drink. When he went to his little bed that night, he was floating up to his ears. He kept talking about the deadly paididion that was following him, and wanting Johnny to let him come to grips with it.
"The next day the Old Man came down on us like a ton of osmium. He called us up to the bridge and said things that—well, I'm not a young man any more, but they made me feel like I was about fifteen, and Johnny had tears in his eyes before he was done. Then he sent a couple of crewmen into the hold and they smashed the carboy and poured out the juice. One of them told me afterward that there were tears in his eyes, too.
"It seems that that black-hearted ape, Farquarson, had woke up with the hangover of the eon. Instead of taking his medicine like a little man, he'd gone loping to the captain for 'remedial agents.' And then, of course, the fat was frying merrily.