Destruction of R. Sammy

The destruction of R. Sammy is the act that exposes the Commissioner’s role in the murder of Dr. Sarton: the robot had carried the weapon used in the killing and knew too much to be left intact. Its destruction was meant to remove a dangerous witness and to implicate Elijah Baley, but Baley turns the apparent evidence against himself into an account of the Commissioner’s plan.

Background and Motive

Baley connects R. Sammy’s destruction to the Commissioner’s effort to obstruct the Sarton investigation and get Baley into trouble. He argues that the Commissioner selected the Williamsburg power plant to frame him, then arranged for Dr. Gerrigel to be led to R. Sammy’s remains by means of a deliberately maladjusted guide rod. The discovery was not incidental: Baley says the Commissioner counted on Gerrigel to diagnose what had happened correctly.

The motive Baley identifies reaches beyond the framing. R. Sammy knew how a Spacer had been murdered five and a half days earlier. Baley presents the robot’s knowledge as the reason it had become dangerous, linking its destruction directly to the effort to conceal Dr. Sarton’s death.

The Commissioner’s Plan

Baley reconstructs the route by which the weapon passed between the Commissioner and R. Sammy. The Commissioner, he says, sent R. Sammy across open country at night with a blaster and instructions about where to go and when. The Commissioner entered Spacetown through the Personal, where he was relieved of his own weapon; he then received the blaster from R. Sammy, killed Dr. Sarton, and returned the weapon to the robot. R. Sammy carried it back across the fields to New York City.

In Baley’s account, destroying R. Sammy completes the concealment of that chain of events: the robot’s knowledge could no longer expose the Commissioner’s actions. The explanation also accounts for the Commissioner’s presence and the missing weapon, while avoiding the need to suppose that a human New Yorker had crawled a mile under the open sky at night. These details make the robot’s destruction more than an isolated act: it is the last step in a murder plan and an attempt to redirect suspicion toward Baley.

Exposure and Aftermath

When Baley lays out his accusation, the Commissioner falls speechless. Baley puts away his blaster and tells him that Spacetown will not accept his arrest. The confrontation shifts the immediate question from whether Baley can be detained to whether the Commissioner will help contain the consequences of the truth.

Baley urges the Commissioner to quash the R. Sammy business and call it an accident or something, arguing that helping would be the right thing to do and that space colonization is Earth’s only possible salvation. He warns that the truth is known beyond Baley himself and that getting rid of him would ruin the Commissioner. The Commissioner, in tears, agrees to help and says he did what he thought right, calling the destruction an accident. R. Daneel Olivaw confirms through cerebroanalysis that the Commissioner is sincere.

Significance

R. Sammy’s destruction first appears as a clue that can be manipulated to incriminate Baley; the revealed history makes it evidence of the Commissioner’s concealed involvement in Dr. Sarton’s murder. The robot’s prior role as courier and its knowledge turn it into a witness whose removal cannot erase the events it connects. Baley’s account converts the destruction from an apparent solution to the case into the act that helps expose its larger design.