Enderby attempted to assassinate R. Daneel

The attempted assassination of R. Daneel Olivaw is the scheme Julius Enderby formed against the first robot of Daneel’s kind, intending to destroy a technological symbol of the future he feared. The plot failed through mistaken identity: Enderby killed Roj Nemennuh Sarton instead, and the circumstances of the mistake allowed Elijah Baley to reconstruct the crime and expose Enderby’s responsibility.

Motive and Intended Target

Baley’s explanation distinguishes Enderby’s intention from the death that actually occurred. Enderby, an earnest Medievalist who had worked with Sarton, knew why Daneel had been designed: the robot represented a prospect that Earthmen might eventually be weaned away from Earth. Enderby feared that outcome and sought to destroy Daneel before the project could demonstrate its promise.

The threat was political as well as personal. As Baley reasoned, Enderby believed that a forceful demonstration of Medievalism on Earth might discourage the Spacers. He also knew that opinion on the Outer Worlds was already strongly disposed to end the Spacetown project. Sarton had apparently discussed that political vulnerability with him, and Enderby meant to make the conflict seem compelling enough to tip opinion toward withdrawal.

Enderby could not simply enter Spacetown as an ordinary visitor. Baley emphasized that Enderby alone had ready access there at all times, a privilege that made him uniquely able to approach Daneel while arranging for the attack to appear to come from elsewhere. Baley further surmised that Enderby would have preferred to delegate the killing, but R. Sammy could not distinguish Daneel from a human well enough to overcome the First Law of Robotics. The plan therefore depended on Enderby’s own access and on making the act look like sabotage rather than deliberate murder.

The Planned Deception

Baley reconstructed a dawn appointment with Sarton as cover. Enderby would arrive early, when Sarton was likely asleep but Daneel awake, and attack Daneel at the dome entrance. He would then leave through Spacetown’s deserted streets and return to R. Sammy, who was waiting outside the city, to give the robot the blaster. Afterward, Enderby could go back to the dome and either discover the body himself or arrange for someone else to do so.

The cover story would have recast his early arrival as a warning: Enderby could claim that he had come to tell Sarton of rumors of a Medievalist attack and urge precautions against open trouble between Spacers and Earthmen. If asked to explain the interval between entering Spacetown and reaching Sarton’s dome, he could claim to have pursued someone lurking in the streets and heading toward open country. In Baley’s reconstruction, that invented pursuit would send investigators down a false trail, while R. Sammy’s presence among robots outside the city would attract little notice.

The scheme rested on controlling how the evidence was interpreted. The intended story presented Daneel’s destruction as an act of anti-Spacer violence, while concealing Enderby’s own role and making the incident serve his political purpose. Yet the distinction between his intention and its result became decisive: he had set out to destroy Daneel, but the person killed was Sarton.

Mistaken Identity and Exposure

The decisive mistake began with Enderby’s glasses. Baley inferred that Enderby had been nervous at the dome, removed and wiped his glasses, and dropped or stepped on them, breaking them. When the door opened, Sarton appeared. Because Sarton had designed Daneel in his own image, Enderby could not tell the two apart without his glasses in that moment of tension.

Enderby attacked the figure he believed to be Daneel, gathered what remained of his glasses, and fled. The body was found before Enderby was identified as its killer; when investigators later came for him, he learned that he had killed Sarton rather than the robot. The likeness between creator and creation, intended as a design choice, thus became the mechanism of the fatal misrecognition.

Baley’s accusation joined motive, access, timing, the glasses, and the mistaken identity into a single explanation. He had searched the transmitted image of the dome’s floor for physical confirmation; when the image centered on the open main door, he spotted a sparkle in the runner grooves. He identified that visible trace as the tangible proof connected with the broken glasses, turning his reconstruction from an account of what might have happened into an accusation supported by an object at the scene.

Consequences and Significance

The attempt did not destroy Daneel or achieve its intended political result. Instead, it killed Sarton, endangered the effort represented by Daneel, and implicated Enderby in the death he had hoped to use against the Spacetown project. The plan’s failure arose not from a change of target but from the attacker’s inability to recognize the person before him.

The episode makes the boundary between human and robot central to the crime’s irony. Daneel was made in Sarton’s likeness, and that resemblance caused Enderby, without his glasses, to mistake the human creator for the robot he meant to attack. The device meant to embody a new relationship between Earthmen and machines becomes, in the plot, both the target of political fear and the source of a fatal confusion.

Baley’s reconstruction also exposes the difference between an act’s intended meaning and its actual consequences. Enderby meant the attack to read as Medievalist resistance and sabotage; the death of Sarton and the evidence at the dome instead reveal the concealed purpose and the mistaken identity behind it. The attempt therefore turns the political performance Enderby planned against the Spacers into evidence against himself.