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The Demolished Man, which is a murder mystery and, in a sense, a detective story, had appeared in Galaxy eighteen months before The Caves of Steel, but it was not a formal mystery. Other murder mysteries had been published in which science fiction played a part: Anthony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue (1942), for instance, or Mack Reynolds's The Case of the Little Green Men (1951). Scientific detectives were common earlier in the century, such as R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke. Sam Moskowitz devoted a section of his Science Fiction by Gaslight to "Scientific Crime and Detection," including stories such as L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace's "When the Air Quivered" from The Strand Magazine (December 1898), and Warren Earle's "In Re State vs. Forbes'' from The Black Cat (July 1906). Moskowitz also cited Edwin Balmer and William B. MacHarg's Luther Trant, Psychological Detective and Arthur B. Reeve's Craig Kennedy. But none of those stories was like The Caves of Steel, in which the murder mystery and the subsequent attempt to unravel the mystery and discover the murderer function as the central structure around which all the other events arrange themselves.
Baley is assigned to the case by an old friend, Julius Enderby, the Commissioner of Police, because the situation with the Spacers is so delicate and Enderby can trust Baley's discretion. Moreover, Baley's loyalty and sense of duty register so high that he can be relied upon to work with a robot.
The case is complicated by the fact that entry to Spacetown is controlled by the Spacers, who put every entering Earthman through a decontamination process that Earthmen consider demeaning. No weapon can be sneaked into Spacetown. Daneel, however, has a possible solution: the Spacer was killed by a group of conservatives called the Medievalists, who want Earthmen to return to a simpler way of life and who resist the introduction of robots. Daneel points out that one of them, with a weapon, could have left New York from one of the hundreds of ancient exits and reached Spacetown by crossing open country. Baley says that is impossible for an Earthman; conditioned by life within the City, he could not cross open country for any reason. A robot, on the other hand, could cross open country but could not kill because of the First Law.
As in every well-made detective story, Baley considers a number of suspects and possible explanations. Because Daneel has been constructed to resemble his maker, the murdered Spacer Roj Nemennuh Sarton, Baley at first accuses Daneel of being Sarton, but Daneel proves he is a robot by opening his arm to reveal his mechanical workings. Later, still desperate to put the blame on the Spacers, Baley accuses

 
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