Mike Eliminates Violent Criminals in the City

Mike’s elimination of violent criminals is a deliberate, months-long intervention that culminates as he and his companions prepare to leave the city. He says he has been assessing people individually, removing those he judges persistently dangerous from the human world rather than treating their removal as a final death; the episode also exposes the limits of his method and his concern that his followers have drawn overly hopeful conclusions from it.

Causes and Preparation

The action follows Mike’s earlier jailbreak. He explains to Jubal that he could not release some prisoners because they were vicious, so he removed them before opening the jail and prison. But the work did not end with those already confined: over many months, Mike had been observing the entire city and assembling a list of people he considered among its worst inhabitants. Some were not in custody, and some held public office. He says he waited until he had reached fullness in each case before acting, making judgment and delay central to the operation rather than carrying out an indiscriminate purge.

The Removals

As the group is about to leave the city, Mike says the people on his list no longer live there; they are missing because he has discorporated them. He estimates that about 150 people were removed the previous night, though he admits he did not count. The scale makes the act more than an extension of the jail escape: Mike has applied his assessment beyond the prison system to people across the city, including officials, and expects the city to be unusually decent for a while as a result.

The surrounding conversation underscores how closely the action is connected to Mike’s developing practice. A sky car begins to land and vanishes before touching down, but Jubal barely comments on it; the extraordinary intervention has become part of the immediate circumstances of their departure. Mike also says Jill has helped him with a similar operation, now sharing his understanding that discorporation should occur only when fullness has been attained.

Purpose and Limits

Mike frames discorporation not as killing but as removing a person from the present world and sending that person back to the beginning to try again. He likens his role to that of a referee ejecting someone for unnecessary roughness. On this account, the intervention is corrective and provisional: the city may become safer, but Mike explicitly rejects the idea that the operation cures the conditions producing violence. He says there is no cure short of acquiring hard discipline.

That qualification matters because Mike’s action could otherwise appear to promise a permanent solution through extraordinary power. Instead, he presents it as a limited response that cannot substitute for the difficult work of discipline. His own judgment also depends on waiting for fullness, a standard he applies case by case rather than claiming that the removal of a large number of people resolves the underlying human problem.

Consequences and Significance

The immediate consequence is a city Mike expects to be unusually decent for a time, while the longer-term problem remains unresolved. The episode thus places temporary public safety beside the absence of a lasting cure: the removals alter who remains in the city, but they do not transform humanity by themselves.

Mike’s deeper concern turns from the people he has removed to the people who follow him. He fears he has misled his brothers: because they have experienced happiness, health, strength, awareness, and mutual love, they believe that eventually the whole human race will reach comparable beatitude. The city action and this confession stand in tension. Mike can intervene decisively in individual cases, but he does not believe that such acts—or even the followers’ present happiness—guarantee humanity’s eventual transformation.