"That's the definition of a good trip," he told me.
"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep."
"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?"
"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?"
"My treat," he said. "Come on."
I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.
Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold "union suit" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.
A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a "safe" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.
I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.