The only answer seemed to be complete utilization of all available land area for food production. And that meant that a lot of land that couldn't grow weeds had to produce edible crops. That's the way things stood back in '02, just after the William Robert Holcomb Foundation's R. S. Explorer returned from Venus with what the botanists thought might be an answer.
Of course, the Earth-Luna System was well traveled even then, but it took the big money of the Holcomb Foundation plus a whopping World Federal Government grant to make a deep space mission feasible.
It was a Holcomb Foundation metallurgist's synthesis of impervium that made deep space navigable. Before this time all ships were chemical-fuelled because the weight of lead needed to shield atomics would nail any spacer built to terra firma ... but good. Chemical ships could make Luna, but no farther. Lucky to get that far with the pumps feeding the jets a stream of monoatomic hydrogen as thick as your arm. A ship could carry about enough juice to get up the necessary seven-a-second with maybe enough for landing ... maybe. Even then plenty of ships that carried a pound or two of mass too much arced back to Earth and splashed themselves all over the ground. Others got up escape-velocity only to run dry trying to land on Luna. Their metal bones are still up there; if you care to look for them.
Impervium changed all that. Here was a metal that was easily worked, as light as a good quality aluminum-magnesium alloy, and strong as steel. And it was impervious to everything except neutrino bombardment. That was the ticket to deep space. Atomics were in and chemicals out. I might add that none of us were sorry to see them go, either.
Luna remained the jumping-off place. And Foy City was the staging area for trips to ... UP. Before the successful flight of the Explorer, Foy had been just a combination mining and scientific camp. After the Explorer returned from Venus, spacemen began to pour up from Earth, and Foy City became one of the rowdiest places under Sol. Jetmen and pilots, tubemen and ABs, all the restless flotsam of humanity flowed up to Luna in a steady stream to mingle with the miners from the Diggings and the longhairs from the Cosmiray Labs and the big dome of Starview.
Mars was reached and colonization began. And men set up a settlement on Venus. The Holcomb Foundation was convinced that they had the answer to the critical food shortage on Earth. Weather-plant. The one useful thing that stinking Venus produces.
Weather-plant is a moss-like plant that will grow almost anywhere. The Foundation botanists found that it gathered nitrogen and water in some inexplicable way, and they became interested in its possibilities. Something had to be done about soil reclamation back on Earth, or starvation would strangle the race. Weather-plant looked like the answer. What the smart boys couldn't have guessed was that in addition to its other strange properties, weather-plant was intelligent—sentient, at least. And they didn't know that it liked its wet, foggy environment very, very much.
I hit Foy City with a mammoth thirst and very little spending money. A bad combination. I had a Pilot's rating and a brand-new Second Officer's ticket, and I needed a job.
I'd been handling a regular chemical flight out of Foy to Montevideo for a one horse concern that was still trying to make the low grade uranium ore found on the Moon pay off. When I came down onto the great pumice plain of Mare Imbrium that served Foy as a spaceport, the patched-up blow-torch I was jockeying blew a venturi and buried herself under twenty feet of pumice. If it had happened on Earth, we'd have been cooked, but Luna's one-sixth gravity saved our hides. Those were the days before tractor-pressor beam landings, you see. Back then you landed a can by balancing her on her tail-flare like a ball on a water spout. And that was a rough go anyway you want to look at it.