ead, I said: "That's right." My voice must have sounded pretty
muffled to him through my fishbowl.

"Come on down, Mr. Oak. You can shuck your vac suit below."

I thought "below" was a pretty ambiguous term on a low-gee lump like
this, but I followed him down the ladder. The ladder was a necessity
for fast transportation; if I'd just tried to jump down from one floor
to the next, it would've taken me until a month from next St.
Swithin's Day to land.

The door overhead closed, and I could hear the pumps start cycling.
The warning light turned red.

I took off my suit, hung it in a handy locker, showing that all I had
on underneath was my skin-tight "union suit."

"All right if I wear this?" I asked the blond young man, "Or should I
borrow a set of shorts and a jacket?" Most places in the Belt, a union
suit is considered normal dress; a man never knows when he might have
to climb into a vac suit--_fast_. But there are a few of the
hoity-toity places on Eros and Ceres and a few of the other
well-settled places where a man or woman is required to put on shorts
and jacket before entering. And in good old New York City, a man and
woman were locked up for "indecent exposure" a few months ago. The
judge threw the case out of court, but he told them they were lucky
they hadn't been picked up in Boston. It seems that the eye of the
bluenose turns a jaundiced yellow at the sight of a union suit, and he
sees red.

But there were evidently no bluenoses here. "Perfectly all right, Mr.
Oak," the blond young man said affably. Then he coughed politely and
added: "But I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to take off the gun."

I glanced at the holster under my armpit, walked back over to the
locker, opened it, and took out my vac suit.

"Hey!" said the blond young man. "Where are you going?"

"Back to my boat," I said calmly. "I'm getting tired of this runaround
already. I'm a professional man, not a hired flunky. If you'd called a
doctor, you wouldn't tell him to leave his little black bag behind; if
you'd called a lawyer, you wouldn't make him check his brief case. Or,
if you did, he'd tell you to drop dead.

"I was asked to come here as fast as possible, and when I do, I'm told
to wait till tomorrow. Now you want me to check my gun. The hell with
you."

"Merely a safety precaution," said the blond young man worriedly.

"You think I'm going to shoot Ravenhurst, maybe? Don't be an idiot." I
started climbing into my vac suit.