"Well," the agent said, "we'll probably be leaving Earth's atmosphere in
about fifteen minutes. I think I'll go play pinochle with the pilot."

He carefully left the door of the cell unlatched as he left. He walked
to the control room and found Wilkins, a dry cigar butt clenched between
his teeth, absorbed in a magazine.

"Let's have another game," Jordan said. "I want some of that
seventy-six dollars back."

Wilkins shook his head. "I'm in the middle of a good story here. Real
sexy. I'll play you after we take off."

"Nothing doing," Jordan said sharply. "Let's play right now."

Wilkins kept reading. "We got an eighteen-hour flight in front of us.
You have lots of time."

The agent snatched the magazine out of his hands. "We're going to play
right now in my cabin," he said.

"You quit when I have aces and a flush, and now you come back and want
to play again. That's not sportsmanlike," Wilkins complained, but he
allowed himself to be led back to Jordan's cabin. "I never saw anybody
so upset about losing a miserable seventy-six bucks," was his final
comment.

* * * * *

The robot lay perfectly still until he heard the door to Jordan's cabin
slam shut, and then he arose as quietly as he could and stole out into
the hall. The steel of the hall floor groaned, but bore his weight, and
carefully, trembling with excitement inside of his ponderous metallic
body, he made his way to the control room. He knelt and lifted the
little trap door and found the naked power cable, pulsating with
electrical current.

In a locker under the panel board he found a length of copper wire. It
was all he needed for the necessary connection.

Since his capture, his fellows on Grismet had been silent with despair,
but as he knelt to close the circuit, their minds flooded in on him and
he realized with a tremendous horror that there were now nineteen, that
all except he had been bound and fixed in their eternal cement prisons.

"We are going to have our chance," he told them. "We won't have much
time, but we will have our chance."

He closed the circuit and a tremendous tide of electric power flowed
into his head. Inside that two-inch shell of permallium was a small
strip of metal tape on whose electrons and atoms were written the
borrowed mind of a man. Connected to the tape was a minute instrument
for receiving and sending electromagnetic impulses--the chain by which
the mind of one robot was tied