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Page 109
put him under restraint. Leebig commits suicide rather than endure someone's physical presence.
On Earth, when Baley reports to Undersecretary Albert Minnim in Washington, Minnim points out that Leebig could not have killed Delmarre because he could not have endured Delmarre's physical proximity; he would rather die than be that close to another person, as, in fact, he did. Baley admits that Gladia actually killed her husband in a fit of anger (and during a temporary blackout of consciousness), but Leebig had arranged it. Leebig knew of Gladia's quarrels and frustrations with her husband, and instructed the robot to hand her one of its detachable limbs at the moment of her full fury.
Here, as in The Caves of Steel, the murder is the precipitating event and the structural element holding the novel together, but it is not the chief focus of the reader's interest. No one in the novel either knows or likes Delmarre at most they respect him as "a good Solarian" nor does anyone care about his death. The only real motivation behind Baley's desire to solve the murder is to save the only logical suspect, Gladia, from being accused of having committed the act. Motivations other than discovering the murderer everyone believes that it was Gladia exist for almost everyone else as well.
Baley (who now has been promoted to C-6) has still other reasons for his presence on Solaria. He has been asked by Minnim to observe conditions on Solaria because Earth sociologists have predicted that Earth is too dangerous to the Outer Worlds for them to allow Earth to survive. The sociologists expect the Outer Worlds virtually to wipe out Earth within a century. But no Earthman has been allowed to visit the Outer Worlds. Consequently, Earth knows the strengths of the Spacers but not their weaknesses. On the other hand, Daneel (who is again Baley's partner, though he plays a lesser part than in The Caves of Steel) has been sent to Solaria to provide help for Baley and to give him the prestige of associating with a Spacer (Daneel passes as human). In reality, however, Daneel is there because the Aurorans (who are from a Spacer planet that has established a more rational relationship between humans and robots) are uneasy about political and technological developments on Solaria and concerned that Solaria might threaten not only Earth but other Spacer worlds.
One major focus of reader interest is Solarian living conditions. Where overpopulation and social and psychological adaptations to it were a major aspect of The Caves of Steel, underpopulation and adaptations of the Solarians are the focus of The Naked Sun. Solaria, which was settled about three hundred years earlier by the well-to-do of a comparatively

 
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