The history books will tell you that during the last few years of the 20th Century the population of North America increased by something like 600 per cent. They might even tell you that this put such a load on the continental resources--food, mainly--that famine became a possibility for the first time in the history of the continent. Things were pretty tight. People were actually starving amid the technological wonders of the time. Hydroponics were tried, but they fizzled badly. 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.