Establishment of Spacetown set the terms of contact between the Spacers and New York City: an initially open-facing project became a guarded enclave, and its force barrier made access a matter of permission, inspection, and political trust. The episode also establishes the contrast between the City’s immense but delicately interdependent infrastructure and the Spacers’ effort to introduce robots into its economy as part of a wider colonization strategy.

Establishment and Restricted Access

When Spacetown was first established, about twenty-five years before the present investigation, there was a strong tendency to make it a showplace. Crowds from the City were herded in its direction, but the Spacers put an end to that access. Their response was polite but uncompromising: they raised a force barrier between themselves and the City and created a combined Immigration Service and Customs Inspection.

Entry required visitors with business there to identify themselves, submit to a search, undergo a medical examination, and receive routine disinfection. The rules made Spacetown not merely a place separated by a physical barrier, but a territory whose residents controlled who could cross into it and on what terms. The eventual decision to make the medical examination more unobtrusive softened one conspicuous aspect of that regime without abandoning the underlying protection of Spacetown’s isolation.

The Barrier Riots and Their Aftermath

The restrictions produced dissatisfaction and helped obstruct the City’s modernization program. Baley remembered the Barrier Riots as a participant: the mob hung from expressway rails, crowded into seats without regard for rating privileges, and ran recklessly along and across moving strips, risking broken bodies. For two days the protesters remained just outside the barrier, shouting slogans and destroying City property in frustration. One chant, “Man Was Born on Mother Earth, Do You Hear?”, remained in Baley’s memory.

The barrier itself could not be broken by any method available on Earth. The Spacers waited behind it until City authorities quieted the crowd with somno vapor and retch gas. Afterwards, below-level penitentiaries filled with ringleaders, malcontents, and people detained simply because they were nearby; after a time, all were released. The confrontation thus ended not with the barrier’s defeat but with the City’s suppression of the protest and the Spacers’ continued separation.

After a proper interval, the Spacers eased the restrictions. The barrier was removed, and the City Police took responsibility for protecting Spacetown’s isolation. The reduction in visible medical scrutiny marked a change in procedure, while the assignment of policing to the City preserved a boundary between the communities in a less overt form.

The City That Spacetown Confronts

The dispute took place against the scale and organization of City life. New York City covered more than two thousand square miles and had a population well above twenty million; Earth had about eight hundred Cities, averaging ten million people each. Each City was nearly self-sufficient economically and could roof itself in, gird itself about, and burrow itself beneath the surface, forming a vast enclosure of steel and concrete.

That enclosure depended on coordinated systems rather than independence from the wider world. Administrative offices occupied the center; residential Sections connected by expressways and local ways; factories, hydroponic plants, yeast-culture vats, and power plants lay toward the outskirts. Water pipes and sewage ducts, schools, prisons, shops, power lines, and communication beams threaded through the whole. The City’s claim to mastery over its environment therefore coexisted with a vulnerability built into its dependence on continuous flows of supplies and infrastructure.

That vulnerability is made explicit in the explanation that New York must keep water entering and waste leaving, maintain nuclear power plants with uranium supplies that are increasingly difficult to obtain, and receive wood pulp for yeast vats and minerals for hydroponic plants. Air must circulate without pause, and interruption of the City’s inputs and outputs for even an hour is presented as a threat. The barrier’s history is consequently more than a clash over admission: it belongs to a world where the City’s apparent self-containment depends on systems and resources extending beyond its walls.

Political Stakes and the Present Crisis

The later investigation revives the memory of the barrier because Baley fears that the Spacers may restore it. If they conclude that an Earthman entered Spacetown and committed murder, he reasons, the barrier might go up again. The earlier easing of restrictions is therefore reversible; the possibility of renewed separation hangs over the present case and gives the investigation consequences beyond identifying a killer.

Spacetown’s role is also tied to a deliberate economic and colonial policy. A Spacer explains that introducing robots on Earth is intended to upset the balance of the City economy. Baley recognizes the immediate human cost as the creation of displaced and declassified people. The stated aim is to form a nucleus for colonization: people with little to lose on Earth might leave for other worlds. Establishment of Spacetown thus links guarded contact, economic disruption, and the prospect of outward migration, making the enclave both a site of political separation and an instrument in a contested vision of humanity’s future.