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Daneel of committing the murder and hiding the blaster in his food sac, but Earth's leading robot expert, Dr. Gerrigel, by questioning Daneel, finds that his First Law is intact. |
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Sammy, the office robot who replaced one young office worker, is found by Dr. Gerrigel with his brain destroyed. Baley is likely to be accused of Sammy's destruction because Baley complained about him and had access to the "alpha-sprayer" that did the destruction. Baley has only an hour or so before the Spacers terminate the case. He confronts Enderby with evidence that the Commissioner himself is guilty both of Sarton's death and of Sammy's destruction. Enderby had planned to destroy Daneel and had Sammy carry the blaster across open country to Spacetown. Enderby shot Sarton, thinking he was Daneel, and returned the weapon to Sammy before the crime was discovered. |
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The murder and its detection, though ingenious, are not the primary interest of the novel. No one ever gets worked up about Sarton's death. The Commissioner is agitated and later this becomes one clue to his guilt but the Spacers are calm. The possible consequences are more important than the murder itself, and the consequences are science fictional. First, the Spacers have the power to inflict indemnities on Earth if they are offended; and second, the entire New York police force will be humiliated and Baley may lose his job, his hard-won status, and his privileges. |
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There are even larger consequences: a group among the Spacers, for instance, is forcing the introduction of robots on Earth in order to upset the Cities' economy and to create a group of displaced men who eventually will want to emigrate to unsettled planets. That group believes that the fifty Spacer worlds are too stable and have lost their desire to colonize new planets. Earthmen may be able to develop a new, more desirable collaboration of humans and machines that the Spacers call C/Fe (pronounced "see fee"), for carbon and iron which are the basic elements for the two kinds of human and robot existences. But other Spacers oppose the plan and may be able to seize upon Sarton's murder as an excuse to stop the effort. |
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Even this conflict does not reach the heart of the appeal of The Caves of Steel for the science-fiction reader. That resides in something more basic that is not even in the human-robot collaboration, reluctant as it is on Baley's part, attractive as it is to the reader in the contrast it presents between Baley's emotionalism and Daneel's unmoved intellectualism (a bit like the later relationship between Star Trek's Jim Kirk and Mr. Spock). The basic concern is the Cities themselves and the people who live in them. |
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