The Robot Daneel had been sent from his cabin as Elijah was not about to let certain aspects of his reports ever get back to Aurora or the Spacers. He turned on his voice transcriber and continued.
I regret to be of the opinion that Earth's future is bleak. We live on the razor's edge between what we accept now and total destruction by our own hands. What happens if something went wrong in any one of our Cities? How many thousands or millions would die as a result of what may have been a minor dislocation of services a few hundred years ago? Can the other Cities take up the strain in resources? Would they at the expense of their own citizens? Would the affected City stand idly by and allow itself to be ignored in its day of crisis? Would they accept that condemnation of perhaps millions and if not how would they react?
The answer, as I see it, is not positive. Thousands if not millions would eventually flock to the other Cities, straining their resources to the breaking point and even if the other Cities were willing to allow it, one City's collapse would in time create a cascading effect. The Medievalists want to return to the ways of thousands of years ago when we all lived outside and drew all of our sustenance from that environment. Can we do that today? Can we dismantle our Cities and truly return? Can we do this without millions if not billions of dead? We cannot. We crossed that line some time ago. To "go back to the land" as some Medievalists advocate is not possible without billions dying of starvation and such for their cause. We are stuck on this Razor's Edge between what we do have and massive if not total suicide for us. How many of us can truly survive outside our Cities? And even if we could say millions and millions, how many would be left alive and able to live once the City nuclear plants went through the inevitable meltdowns?
We, of Earth, are all prisoners of our own Cities. We try and control the growth of population, but there are steps we refuse to take - and I do not advocate taking them. Genetic euthanasia may be the practice on Spacer worlds - it is on the ones I've visited - but I do not suggest this solution nor do I suggest the mandatory sterilization of those who violate breeding protocols as Spacers do. But our imprisonment in our Caves of Steel is - in the long run - our death sentence. We must get out! We must be able to expand! We must or we will one day all die. We who are alive today might not see this fate, but our descendants surely will at one point. The future of Earth - its prolonged future is not here on Earth, but in the vast expanses of the Galaxy! We must expand or surely we shall perish! Regrettably, while most of our billions are ignorant of this (as I was), it is not a surprise to many and especially those in the right places in government. We do our best for all, hoping the problem will not arise during our lifetimes but all the while knowing if we don't find a solution before it's too late, it is left to our children and maybe, by then, it will be too late for Earth.
But for a thousand years and more we could not and cannot move off into the Galaxy. The Spacers prevented this with their treaties and battle fleets to back them up. If we remain confined to our solar system, we will perish in time. But how can we leave when we're forbidden from doing so under pain of swift and certain orbital bombardment? This conundrum has held us back, kept us isolated, kept us compliant for generations too many to count. Perhaps it's not our fate to forward mankind. Perhaps we are a dead end. But to believe that one must believe that the Spacers are the future.
They are not.
Some of them know this.
We are the future! But to understand that, one must first understand Spacers.
We are prisoners: prisoners of our Cities and of the Spacer control of interstellar space. Spacers are slaves! Just about each and every one of us of Earth understand we are imprisoned on our world. Very, very few Spacers understand that they are as much imprisoned and maybe more so than we are. How many robots are there one Earth? A few million or hundred million at best? This is against some nearly nine billion humans? How many of those billions have ever seen a robot? I dare say most have not. Those artificial intelligent things exist outside our cities in the open spaces. And they all are replaceable! We don't need them to maintain our standard of living, just some millions willing to step outside, live outside and tend the fields and livestock, fish the seas and harvest the forests for our micor-culture farms. I dare to suggest that given a choice between Unclassification or a life of low Classification, we could find the necessary numbers for the farms, mines and forests and be done with the robots - but that is not the answer.
As I said, we of Earth are imprisoned. We can't change this. Right now, all we can hope to do is free a handful to life at labor outside our prison. The Spacers, however, are enslaved to the culture they accepted from the start. Given the chance, we of Earth can find those who would leave our world behind - millions upon millions even today. Given the chance, they can't except by the comparative scores or less. Our poison which threatens to condemn us is our enforced isolation both on Earth and in the galaxy. Their's are their robot minders.
I concede I do not know the precise numbers. There are, last I recall, well over eight point five billion humans on Earth and we represent more than two thirds of the entire human population of the Galaxy with the other third spread out on some fifty Spacer worlds. Aurora is the oldest and largest in terms of human population and inhabitance. It was the first colony. It has around two hundred million people and twenty robots per person. Assuming that is at one extreme - as far as robot to human ratio is concerned - and Solaria the newest human world is at the other with some 20,000 humans and 20,000 robots per human, a simple extrapolation of the average shows us there are more robots in the galaxy than humans by an order of magnitude if not more. A conservative estimate would be around one hundred billion of the things. And yet, 99.99998 percent of those or more are not and have never been on Earth! If anything, they are more prisoners of their robots than we are of our Cities.
What do I mean by this?
I have, after all, only been to and observed to Spacer worlds out of fifty. But given those two, I can assume the others are somewhere in between.
AURORA:
Human population: approximately two hundred million based upon their sources.
Robot to Human ratio: 20:1 - although five to one in personal servant robots is closer to the average per person. Every human has at least one robot and probably two. They never leave home without one in attendance. I met a Hairdresser and Haberdasher, a sole proprietor at the lower end of their economic scale who had three personal robots for his residence and personal escort. I have no idea if he had others for his business, although it would not have surprised me if he did. One must understand that their industry and agriculture is all robot labor so the 20:1 ration includes their entire manual labor force.
SOLARIA:
Human population: around 20,000.
Robot to human ratio: 20,000:1. The humans live in isolation such that in any congested part of the planet it is hundreds of kilometers from your residence to your own property line, much less to the nearest human being. Allowed a spouse for procreative purposes, the estates are such that without a scheduled appointment to copulate, the two might never meet inadvertently.
Neither society can exist without robots. Take away the robots, Solaria dies within weeks and Aurora in months or less. In that regard, they are more susceptible to failure of their robotic system than we are to our City system. But aside from a small handful of them, they see no weakness.
Aside from the fact we are all human, do our societies have ANY similarities? Indeed we do, but for different reasons and to different degrees. We practice population control here on Earth. We have to. Resources are limited and to allow freedom to breed at will as it were would stretch those resources to and beyond the breaking point within a generation. But as extreme as our measures may be, they pale compared to the Spacers and their fifty worlds of resources. We take our measures to stave off famine. They take theirs to maintain their higher (much higher) standard of living. Would we terminate a pregnancy simply because it was unauthorized? Do we? No, we do not. The child's parents are punished with classification downgrades or declassification. Even in the worst case, the child has health care, they are fed as any of us are, and they have access to education in a society where anyone can rise from the depths of the Unclassified. On both Aurora and Solaria, assuming such a thing were even possible, the child would be terminated. Even if a child were authorized, should it prove genetically unacceptable to their standards, it is also terminated. Should it prove in excess of population quotas for it's generation, it is subject to termination. This has nothing to do with their real access to resources and everything to do with their desire to maintain their abnormally high - by human historical standards - standard of living. It is exacerbated by the fact that their life expectancy exceeds ours by four times our average and it did not cross my mind to ask for how long in their 300 and more years of life a Spacer woman remained fertile. The only one I met in my travels who was slated to breed was younger than me in real terms by a decade in our years. I cannot say that their women can breed any longer in real years than ours. Perhaps they can, but even then I have no idea for how much longer. Still, and given our limitations in resources, why is it we value the unwanted or imperfect child and they would terminate it without hesitation?
In part, it's because we raise our children and they don't. On Solaria, the child is surgically removed as an embryo not long after the pregnancy is confirmed and incubated in what to me looked like some kind of vat. There, the embryo and fetus are tested an monitored for "undesirable" traits and if found terminated. This monitoring continues until they become full adults and failure to measure up means death. It is said to be painless and merciful, but the notion is sickening.
Aurora's not as harsh, but by our standards of population control, it's unacceptable. Unauthorized children are terminated without prejudice. Auroran mothers carry their child to term, but such children will be euthanized if found genetically unacceptable. On both planets, children are not raised by their birth parents. To do so on Solaria would require the parents to become physically involved with another human, something most of them develop a pathological fear of doing more so than we of Earth develop with regard to the Outside. On Aurora, it's just not done. Raising children is probably a distraction for them. Spacer children are raised by robots for the most part. They are raised, for lack of a better term, on children farms!
On both Spacer worlds, each in and of itself at the opposite socially of the other, marriage is all about procreation and not about long term partnership. Solaria, this is the case because procreation must still occur by sexual union but it is the rare Solarian who would ever think or even enjoy such physical proximity to another human. It is merely viewed as a necessary and yet totally undesirable fact of their life one thankfully discarded forever once their biological quota has been met. It is as asexual and un-sexual a world as there ever could be and if they ever develop viable technology to keep human physical interactions entirely out of the process of procreation, they will do it and implement it.
On Aurora, marriage is by consent of the parties and not by genetic determinations as on Solaria. Children, however, are determined by genetic examinations. But socially, Aurorans are the Anti-Solarians. They marry only for the right to breed and add a child to the farms. Even then, polygamy is not anathema to them for either sex and sexual fidelity is considered a form of social perversion. Dancing for us Earthers is more of a meaningful relationship than having sex is for Aurorans. Consensual sex is acceptable for any Auroran over the age of ten of our years. Sexually speaking, there is no social exclusivity in marriage. There is no social stigma to having sex with anyone (or it seems anything) outside of marriage. Sex is freely offered and freely given, but always by mutual consent. Legal relationships have no meaning. Adultery as we know it does not exist there. Marriages are for procreation rights only and once the right is over, they often break up. Even during such time, they are free and it is accepted to engage in sexual activity with anyone else. I cannot say how they prevent unanticipated conceptions with their extra-marital liaisons. Marriage is for convenience and children for the most part. Once the child is born, that marriage ends it seems. After all, it's not like they have to raise the child as that is done on the farms by robots.
For those who wish to write of interstellar romance, by and large the Spacer worlds are already dead that way. Either because the sexual aspect is abhorrent as on Solaria, or far too open, sex has lost its allure and with it the romance that leads to it and to a long term and exclusive relationship with another. To say this is dead entirely is inaccurate, but one must look to the extreme minority who prove the rule as it were. In my experience, there were two. Each were younger than me in real terms and very young by Spacer terms. Each were defying or wanted to defy their own culture's norms about sex and romantic love. One was Gladia of Solaria and despite what the damnable and obviously intergalactic subethric drama which damned too many see as the truth, there was no romance between us. She would have accepted that - a romance that is. She would have gone so far as to move to Earth for that and without our immunities to even the most mild of infections, she would have died of the common cold within a year. She wanted romance and that was why she was in the situation she was in on Solaria, it was why she could be manipulated into killing the "proper" Solarian husband - which she did. Her world of Solaria despite its comfort and luxury was dead to her. But she was the exception on that world and maybe the only one. From my perspective, despite killing her husband in a fit of rage of which she has no memory, she is the only redeemable thing from that world. She moved to Aurora, sexually speaking and socially at the opposite end of the perspective and found that as sterile a place in its own way as Solaria.
Enter Santirix Gremoinis, an Auroran and artist by our definition, if one considers hair styling and clothing design art. Gladia was an Artist on Solaria, although we on earth would have (and I did) difficulty appreciating her very, very abstract style. On Aurora, where she relocated, she adjusted to a culture that found her style … unappealing and when into her own form of fashion design. So she and Santirix had this in common. And socially, Santirix was as far removed from the "free sex" culture of Aurora as Gladia was of the "No Intimacy" culture of Solaria. They each wanted the true, long term relationship each knowing that long term for a Spacer was measured in hundreds of our years. He courted her, for lack of a better word. She accepted his friendship and company, but not his Auroran style offers of intimacy. I never really learned what they were, just hints here and there, but it seems to have been as sterile as saying "wanna take a piss?" I told Gladia to be more open to his advances as Auroran as they were and Santirix to be less Auroran in his approach and deep down, I do wish it works for them both. If some jackass intends another drama from my recent off-world experience, please portray me as the matchmaker and not the love interest … rant done.
Gladia and Santirx are brought up because they, more than any other Spacer I've ever met, prove that Spacers are or can indeed be human by our definition. But this is a side bar as the lawyers say. What is the point?
I was chosen to investigate the murder of Dr. Sarton of Aurora by the then Commissioner of the New York City Police Department. I have a heavy suspicion as to why. As we now know, he blasted the Spacer to oblivion and covered his tracks with an Earth robot R. Sammy. Mistaken identity, it was. His target was the human form Robot Daneel who looked very much like Dr. Sartan of Aurora and even more so to an uncorrected, nearsighted eye without corrective lenses. I was the Commissioner's friend and still am to this day. I was a safe bet to cover his mistake - or so he thought at the time. But why the later investigations?
I'd like to think I'm a good and capable cop. But to be so singled out by the Spacers? Why? Am I truly the best in the world? Am I truly the best in the Galaxy? I doubt that. I do my job and that's all I do! And yet, three times after the Sarton case the Spacers called on me - on me specifically again. Why? Don't they have their own police? (In their robot dominated society I think it's safe to say not really). But why me? Why me? Why me? Each and every time I was called into what I see as the Spacer realm, be it here on Earth or off planet, I asked myself that question and found no answer … until now, I think.
Let's deal first with my first Spacer case. Dr. Sarton of Aurora was found blown apart in the meeting room of Spacetown just on the edge of New York and, therefore if the Spacers agreed, within its jurisdiction. It was an Out of Section assignment for me from the Chief of Police himself. The Spacers suspected an Earther attack. But they turned the investigation over to a lowly Plainclothesman Detective. They could've just declared it an Earther attack and have been done with it, couldn't they. We'd be subjected to sanctions, forced to pay an indemnity or face their battle fleet and there's not a damned thing we could do to prevent it and yet they insisted on a joint investigation - I know, I've later checked. My being called in was a matter of a degree of happenstance. My boss was the killer and we'd been friends since college. I guess he assumed I'd cover his ass. I'm not and have never been that sort of cop. Not with a body blasted at point blank range.
I don't need a forensics team to prove that bit. Couldn't have used one even if I needed one. Damned evidence at the crime scene, remains included, were gone when I arrived. Nothing but the damned Spacer holographic projections of the crime scene to go on and of course, if they had holography of the crime itself, they sure as hell didn't share it. What I did see made the manner of death obvious - it was a Blaster at very close range. Poor bastard literally exploded when his internals heated up in sufficient volume (range dependant) in that fraction of a second. His head, arms and lower torso and legs were intact, but the rest was nothing more than an exploded goo. Don't need a forensic tech to tell me the shot was from less than a meter away from its point of impact. Don't need a forensics type to tell me why the shooter wasn't dripping in goo either as any who know about blasters know the pop of overheating, if it breaks the skin, always is away from the point of impact of the beam. Spacers had accounted for all of their blasters and none had been fired, but there was no murder weapon at the crime scene or anywhere nearby and no clear suspect aside from - from their obvious point of view - and Earther.
But how? Did you ever, ever try to get through Spacer security? They prodded you and probed you and if you were even allowed to carry a blaster, you had to leave it behind. You were made biologically if not sexually sterile, just to get into Spacetown. How the hell could you bring in a blaster?
The obvious answer was that it was already there and this was not far from the truth. Still, that answer leads to the obvious conclusion that the perpetrator had to be a resident of Spacetown and yet they - or at least the one true Spacer I spoke with during the course of that investigation, the robotisist and victim's colleague Dr. Han Fostolfe of Aurora - insisted it could only have been done by an Earthman. I might have been willing to concede that there may be millions of Earthmen (and women) in New York alone with motive for the Spacers were forcing their robots upon us at the cost of jobs and Classifications. Any one of those condemned to declassification would have motive and the many more living in fear of declassification likewise would be motivated to take some action however desperate to rid New York of the robots and their source. But means and opportunity were seriously lacking. It was not as if we Earthmen could come and go as we please even without any weapons. Access even to the security screening in Spacetown was restricted to a select few in government and industry on official business and by appointment only and if Spacetown had more than such visitor a day, it was a particularly busy day for them. On the day in question there was only one scheduled visitor: Julius Endbury, Commission of the New York City Police Department. So the question remained, how did a blaster get there, what happened to it and who did the deed.
Dr. Fastolfe suggested a possibility which I initially dismissed as ludicrous. The good Doctor suggested that the Earthman perpetrator physically left the city with the weapon, crossed open ground, entered Spacetown by one of their unguarded and unmonitored exits to the Outside, mudered Dr. Sarton and returned the way he came. I felt there were so many holes in this theory it had to be a joke and if so in poor taste.
First of all, there is the blaster itself. I concede that at the time I knew less about Spacers and their culture than I did about robots and I knew next to nothing about robots beyond the introductory course in Robotics I received in college over twenty years earlier. For all I knew, Spacers had ready access to blasters on their worlds. This is not the case as they are as heavily restricted and regulated there as they are on Earth but I could not know that at the time. As you are aware, on Earth blasters are both highly restricted and highly regulated and limited to law enforcement personnel only. In New York, this means authorized personnel of the New York City Police Department, the Port Authority Police Department, the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigations and Terrestrial Security forces. If there is one thing that will surely get these various agencies working together as one it would be a missing blaster. There were no such missing blasters at the time.
Second, there's the question of egress. I will admit my ignorance at the time for I had no idea - assuming the highly improbable scenario proposed - if it was even possible for any human to leave the city in such a manner. It was. There are well over a hundred such egress points around the city for the purpose of allowing for the transport of food and raw materials from Outside. Each of these portals is guarded by an officer from Port Authority, not to prevent their use but to inspect incoming cargo for vermin. They certainly would have noted a human entering or leaving the City but I concede I never bothered to check. The closest such egress to Spacetown was about seven kilometers away. Dr. Fastolfe suggested the perpetrator walked for a ground vehicle would probably have been noticed if not before and certainly after the fact. A person on foot would have been dismissed - at least at a distance - as just another robot tending to the fields outside. Plausible to a point, unless one includes Earth psychology. Even during the Great Barrier Riots almost thirty years ago when hundreds of thousands of angry citizens were attempting to enter Spacetown by force, they did so at the only physical connection and entryway between New York and Spacetown. Despite the rage and mob mentality, not one person left the City to approach Spacetown across open ground. As Earthmen, we are conditioned to not even consider Outside as a part of the world and, based upon my own personal experiences later, over time we become agorophobic such that psychologically the Outside can rapidly overwhelm us. Naturally, I considered this scenario as probable as the victim's demise being the result of a spontaneous explosion of internal gasses - possible in theory however unrealistic, but so improbable as to approach the impossible.
Some time much later after I returned from Solaria and after I started my "Crackpot" group that does go outside of the City to "dig in the dirt," purely as an exercise of intellectual curiosity and in my spare time when conditions Outside prevented useful dirt digging, I reexamined my suppositions from that case based upon what I had since learned. Is it possible that an Earthman could conceivably have crossed that open ground? Yes, provided he had conditioned himself to being Outside. Our agoropohbia is not an innate part of our being. We are not born with it. It builds over time as a result of the conditioning imposed upon us by the environment we live in. And since it is a learned behavior or psychology and provided it has not reached the level of a true pathology or overwhelming neurosis, it can be unlearned in time with reconditioning. From my experience with the "Crackpot Dirt Diggers," it suffices to say that such conditioning, while peculiar to each individual, is a function of age. Young children require little or no such "baby steps" to the Outside. They step out of the dome without hesitation and are enraptured as opposed to discomfited with their first such excursion. To them, it seems, it's akin to being given the coolest toy ever made. The older the person, the greater the reluctance and apprehension, but again such things diminish with exposure. Thus it is at least outwardly conceivable that someone might have conditioned themselves such that the Spacers' theory as to how the assailant did the deed rose to a level of the plausible.
But that does not take into account environmental factors outside. It might not be as simple as walking seven kilometers in a straight line from the City egress to Spacetown. Terrain, something we don't contend with in the Cities, can turn a seven kilometer straight line into a much, much longer and potentially impossible walk, conditioned to the Outside or not. There may be hills, large rises in the ground that one must either climb or go around. There may be rivers and streams - flowing channels of water on the ground that may bar that approach entirely. Rivers may be impossible to cross without conveyance or the ability to swim and even then, the cold of the water or other factors may well make it suicidal to even try. I have not personally walked that route so I can't say what natural obstructions there may or may not be, but unless the ground were both flat and open, the approach would be longer to at least some degree. Then there is the question of weather.
It is an archaic term here on Earth. We can live our entire lives without any true concern for what the word means. In our day to day lives, its affects are barely noticeable at all. Weather is the conditions in the natural atmosphere. The air temperature within our Cities is maintained at a constant. What that constant is depends upon where you are. Enter the micro-culture farms and the air temperature will vary from field space to field space depending upon the culture in production. The metal mills and power plant working floors are much warmer than the rest of the City, but unless you work in or visit those places, you will not experience a change in air temperature. The same cannot be said for the outside. Air temperature can and does change from day to day, hour to hour and even minute to minute and it can swing markedly at times from warm to very cold and cold to very hot. There is no wind in the Cities. We experience something akin to it on the moving walkways, the expressways and if we happen to be near a major ventilator, but these movements of air against us are predictable. Not so outside. The air moves of its own accord and might not move at all or be moving with such force as to knock you over if you fail to brace yourself or get off balance as you walk.
And the one thing we do not experience in the Cities (outside of a shower) is precipitation. Outside under the right conditions water falls from the sky of its own accord. How much, how long, how warm or how cold varies all the time with each storm or event. It is almost always colder than our coldest shower settings and, of course, we can neither turn it off nor change the settings. If it is cold enough Outside (and there are times during the year when it is - a period known as Winter in the archaic) water freezes. If it falls from the sky, it falls in ice crystals. They are so light, you wouldn't even notice them upon impact, but you will see them as flakes of white falling gently to the ground. It's actually quite pretty, but always quite cold as it must be for water to become ice in any form. This period of cold lasts for months, but it's not constantly cold. At the polar opposite months of the year is what was once called Summer - a period of very warm and often hot air. In between is Spring as cold warms to hot and Autumn as hot cools to cold. The weather varies during all of these times.
We may not experience "the Seasons" in the Cities, but we notice its effects if you think about it. Certain outside foods appear in our Section Kitchens at certain times of the year and not others or, if they do at others, they are not fresh but canned or frozen and we all can tell the difference. Long term weather event will affect quantity. There are some years when strawberries - for example - seem common and others where they seem few and far between. Weather affects how much grows outside and how much can be brought into the Cities at any given time. Prior to my "Crackpot Dirt Digging" I never really noticed this phenomenon. My wife, a Kitchen Dietician by trade, did but not the reasons for it. My own experiences with weather Outside factored into my intellectual re-investigation. I never would have considered it relevant at the time, but it might well have been critical.
Recall, the Spacer theory was that an Earthman with a Blaster crossed seven kilometers of open ground, gained access to their enclave, blasted the victim, and returned the way he had came. Assuming the terrain was not any issue (again, that is something I did not check - my "Dirt Digging" is from a totally different location), what was the weather like? Bad weather might make what may have been plausible implausible and even impossible. Could I find out? Actually, I could.
While the vast majority of us in the Cities can live our lives without any concern for what the natural weather is like on any given day, there are those who are concerned. There are those at Universities who study such things. But there are those whose interest is not merely a matter of academic curiosity, but of practical concern. The New York City, North American Region and Terrestrial Departments of Transportation have people whose sole job is to be concerned with such things. Weather events affect the supply of raw materials either in production or in delivery, so such events are studied and monitored to reduce any possible economic dislocation. A bad season for growing, and production in the micor-culture farms is increased to compensate. A good season and we see more natural food stuffs in our Section Kitchens than before. They keep meticulous and even hourly records of what is happening outside the domes of our Cities and these records are public ones - not that the vast majority of us care. They had records of the local conditions on the day of the murder of Dr. Sarton.
It was mid-winter. There had been a blizzard - and extreme winter storm typified by extreme cold (ten degrees below freezing or worse), high winds (which makes it even colder) and lots of snow. Snow, in those conditions, remains on the ground or is blown again into the air. Its depth is not uniform, for it piles in mounds if there is anything to block the wind even for a moment. You don't walk on snow, you walk through it. Your feet sink into it until it is compressed to withstand your weight. For these piles - called drifts in the archaic - you either wade through them or have to move around them. But while the snow would slow you, it is the cold that will kill you. We Crackpot Dirt Diggers have fortunately not learned that the hard way. When it turned cold, those more adventurous ones acquired the Freezer Gear from the meat cutter lockers - surplus of course. Still, that would have been inadequate on that day. The assailant would have been lucky not to freeze to death on his trek to the target - assuming he knew how to get in which was another bit that bothered me during the original investigation. What was the probability that and Earthman first knew that the barrier was not the only access to Space town (aside from its own Spaceport) and second knew where one was? Not very likely. For most of the investigation at the time I assumed I was chasing the proverbial red herring for it had to be a Spacer!
Logically, that was the only conclusion. Murder requires three things: specific intent often called motive, opportunity and means. The means was a blaster, obviously. But there was no way a blaster could come through their security at the barrier. Their damnable robots would have put and end to that. Motive? As stated before there were easily thousands if not millions in the City with some degree of that. Opportunity? The crossing of open ground by a citizen was discarded from the moment of suggestion. But I had never, until the end, considered the possibility of a robot bringing in the weapon for the assailant.
The rest is a matter of record. Something had crossed that open ground in the midst of a frigid blizzard - a robot. It was a device the Spacers would never suspect and one which was immune to such things while both we and the Spacers are not. It was not the killer, merely the carrier of the instrument of death - a police blaster. It was R. Sammy, assigned to that precinct by treaty and order of the Terries. R. Sammy was deactivated by a radioactive Alpha Sprayer on orders of a human not days later - the Third Law being overridden by the Second. On the day in question, R. Sammy and the blaster were destined for the only Earthman with authorized access to Spacetown at the time, Julius Endbury the Chief of Police. His target was not the Spacer he blew to bits, but a robot - R. Daneel Olivaw, a robot who looks so human it's uncanny and more critically, could be mistaken for the true victim. "And God made man in his own image," and ancient work says and so the victim who fashioned the robot's external appearance did the same. Julius was also near sighted and chose glasses over reconstructive surgery. They had broken before the target arrived. To Julius, who was otherwise familiar with both Dr. Sarton and R. Daneel Olivaw, he might well have been able to tell one from the other with his glasses, but not without. Dr. Sarton died in a case of mistaken identity.
But why? From the standpoint of Julius Endbury, he was doing his duty for Earth and circumstances made it such he made a grave mistake. Julius knew of the purpose of R. Daneel. R. Daneel was not built to be my partner in any investigation, but as a form of infiltration unit. The Spacers wanted to learn about us and our culture but could not - short of suicide - do more than meet us under very controlled conditions. As I said, even the common cold would and could kill them so to physically enter our Cities and society meant death. They also were all too aware of our aversion to robots. They wanted an observer, one who could blend in with the crowd as it were and gather information. A robot - an obvious one - would not serve the purpose. Their probe - for lack of a better word - had to be able to interact with us without that psychological barrier in the way. They had been up front with Julius about this, although not the "why" of it, and he saw it his duty to deal with the infiltrator before it became lost in the masses of our City. He assumed, as most Earthmen would (myself included), nothing but sinister motives on the part of the Spacers.
The events that followed argue that this was not the case. My recent meeting with Dr. Fastolfe (where I was a guest in his house the entire time and he proved to be quite forthright) shows me it was never the case. What happened after? An Earthman (albeit in a case of mistaken identity) had confessed to the killing of a Spacer and not just any Earthman, but a City Commissioner of Police! And what did the Spacers do? Aside from the ancient treaty Trade Delegation and Embassy outside of Washington, they were off planet as a whole faster than you can say 'Jehoshaphat!'. While R. Sammy has been replaced within my Precinct, robot integration into the cities has come to a standstill. What had happened? Why had Earth even been asked for help in this investigation? After all, the Spacers never needed proof of any kind before to come down hard on us! Dead Spacer by blaster - it was an Earthman - Sanctions and more trade concessions! Truth? Irrelevant. The death of Dr. Sarton by our hands or not and with or without our knowledge would be all the pretext they need! And yet…
And yet we were ASKED to investigate, rather than to run an investigation in the hopes that we could prove their pretext wrong and when that investigation PROVED it was an Earthman, they pulled out! No new sanctions, nothing! Why? It was a question that bothered me then, but such intergalactic things are way above my Classification level and certainly outside of my job. Still… Why were we, us diseased and dirty Eathers (in many of their opinions) allowed into this at all? And why, when even we had to concede it was an Earthman who did the deed (mistakenly or not) did they just brush it off and leave? Until very recently, I had no answer…