Blaster

The Blaster is the pivotal missing object in the investigation of Roj Nemennuh Sarton’s murder: its absence from Spacetown’s searched scene makes it a problem to solve, while its later use in a conspiracy against Elijah Baley gives it a second role as planted evidence. The weapon’s controlled movement between the murder site and New York City helps Baley construct a persuasive account of the crime, but the account is ultimately rejected by R. Daneel Olivaw. In the final confrontation, Baley’s own blaster changes the object’s role again, becoming leverage he uses to keep Julius Enderby listening.

Access and the Missing Weapon

At first, the investigation treats access to a blaster as a practical constraint. A City dweller who had been present at the murder scene is suspected, but his innocence is quickly established: he entered Spacetown through the usual process, under which blasters were removed as a matter of course. Investigators check every blaster in Spacetown and find that none has been fired for weeks; the radiation chambers confirm the result. The weapon that killed Sarton is therefore not just unidentified but absent from the place where investigators expect it to be.

The gap becomes part of the case’s central logic. The murder scene has been searched minutely, yet the weapon was not found, and Baley reasons that it could not simply have disappeared. In his reconstruction, only someone present at the scene could have hidden it, unless an Earthman had crossed open country carrying a weapon. R. Daneel is consequently singled out as the only person at the scene who could have concealed the blaster under those conditions. The clue is powerful because the weapon’s absence narrows the possibilities—but it does not, by itself, establish who committed the murder.

A Test and a Theory of Concealment

During a test of R. Daneel’s obedience to the Second Law of Robotics, Baley asks the robot to hand over his blaster. R. Daneel calmly presents it butt first. The episode places a weapon in the hands of the investigator and the robot while Baley considers whether a humanoid robot might be able to evade the First Law of Robotics. It is a test prompted by a theory, not proof that R. Daneel fired the murder weapon; Baley’s suspicion depends instead on the missing gun and the question of who could have hidden it.

Baley’s reasoning distinguishes the immediate clue from a broader exception he has to imagine. A blaster could not have been brought into Spacetown in the ordinary way, because visitors were disarmed, and none of the weapons checked there had been fired recently. He argues that the murderer must therefore have found another route for the weapon: it could have been carried across open country, or placed where a search would not have looked. This line of thought makes the weapon’s journey as important as its firing.

The Alleged Frame-Up

Later, Baley reads the destruction of R. Sammy as part of a deliberate effort to direct suspicion toward him. He argues that the alphasprayer used against the robot was a conspicuous and traceable choice, and that the order sending R. Sammy into the photographic supply room ensured that the method of destruction would be unmistakable. The alphasprayer, he says, had been taken from the Williamsburg power plant, which he and Enderby had visited the previous day. Their presence there could give Baley the opportunity to obtain it; the events could also make them the last people known to have encountered R. Sammy alive, apart from the murderer. In this account, a weapon’s traceability is not a flaw in the scheme but a way to make the evidence point toward Baley.

When Baley accuses Enderby, he specifies the alleged chain of custody. He says Enderby took the alphasprayer from the Williamsburg power plant, gave it to R. Sammy, and then arranged for the robot to lead Dr. Gerrigel to the photographic supply room with a deliberately maladjusted guide rod. Baley presents the discovery of R. Sammy’s remains as a staged consequence of that maneuver: he believes Enderby counted on Dr. Gerrigel correctly identifying the cause of the robot’s destruction. The accusation turns the recovery of a weapon and the discovery of the damaged robot into parts of a single attempted frame-up.

Baley’s Reconstruction of the Murder

Baley also offers a separate reconstruction of Sarton’s murder, using the blaster to explain how the weapon could be present at the crime and absent afterward. In his account, Enderby puts a blaster into R. Sammy’s hand and tells the robot where and when to go. Enderby enters Spacetown through the Personal and is relieved of his own blaster; he then receives the other weapon from R. Sammy, kills Sarton, and returns it to the robot. R. Sammy carries it back across the fields to New York City. On the following day, Baley alleges, Enderby destroys the robot because its knowledge has become dangerous.

This proposed route resolves two difficulties for Baley: it accounts for Enderby’s presence and for the murder weapon’s absence from the scene. It also avoids the need to suppose that a human New Yorker crossed a mile of open country at night. Baley invokes C/Fe—the combined development of humans and robots—to argue that a robot could make that crossing, allowing the weapon to move between the city and Spacetown through R. Sammy. Yet R. Daneel rejects the reconstruction: he says Enderby’s cerebroanalytic profile makes deliberate murder impossible. The blaster’s hypothesized route explains the physical evidence as Baley sees it, but the deduction does not prove the accused man’s guilt.

The Weapon in the Confrontation

In the final exchange, Baley uses a blaster in a different and immediate way. Enderby declares that Baley is under arrest and calls him guilty; Baley interrupts by saying that he has a blaster pointed at the commissioner and that it is cocked. He insists that Enderby listen before taking whatever action he chooses. Enderby stares at the weapon and warns that Baley faces twenty years in the deepest prison level of the City.

R. Daneel then states that he is communicating with Dr. Fastolfe and warns that refusing to hear Baley would invite damaging inferences. Enderby falls silent, and Baley puts his blaster away after laying out the accusation. The object has shifted from an evidentiary mystery to a physical means of compelling attention; its appearance changes the balance of the conversation but does not settle the case. Across these scenes, the Blaster’s significance rests on the gap between what it can establish materially—access, firing, concealment, and movement—and what remains uncertain: who used it to kill Sarton.