Sutton walked slowly forward, strolling, taking his time.
"Johnny," he said, soundlessly.
"Yes, Ash."
"That is all there are — just those two?"
"I think there is another one, but I can't place him. All of them are armed."
Sutton felt the stir of comfort in his brain, the sense of self-assurance, the sense of aid and comradeship.
"Keep me posted, Johnny."
He whistled a bar or two, from a tune that had been forgotten long ago but still was fresh in his mind from twenty years before.
The rent-a-car garage was two blocks up the road, the Orion Arms two blocks farther down. Between him and the Arms were two men, waiting with guns. Two and maybe more.
Between the garage and hotel was nothing…just the landscaped beauty that was a residential, administrative Earth. An Earth dedicated to beauty and to ruling…planted with a garden's care, every inch of it mapped out by landscape architects with clumps of shrubs and lanes of trees and carefully tended flower beds.