The raid on Jubal Harshaw’s home and Valentine Michael Smith’s counterattack turn a search for Gil Berquist into an armed confrontation that ends with the officers and their vehicles gone. From beneath the pool, Smith watches the whole scene through an expanded awareness; when the agents move against Jill, he acts on Jubal’s instruction to protect her, then removes each threat in turn. The sudden disappearance of the force exposes the extraordinary power Smith can wield—and the difficult choices involved in using it.

The raid reaches the pool

Two black squad carriers arrive at Jubal’s property, each marked with the discreet globe insignia of the Federation. One descends into the garden around the pool while the other circles the house at low altitude. Their arrival is not a routine visit: Captain Heinrich identifies himself as a police captain with the Federation Special Service Bureau, and the officers with him follow Jubal’s insistence that each show identification and state his name and pay number. Heinrich then presents a search warrant for Gil Berquist covering the property, its buildings, and grounds.

Smith is in the pool, away from his body, when Jubal and Heinrich begin talking. The human legal rituals are familiar to Smith only as word-shapes encountered in Jubal’s law library; he recognizes his own name among the papers but does not stop to interpret them. Instead, he watches the men spread out, extending his attention across the property. The car lifts and shifts position, briefly freeing beings it had been sitting on; Smith attends to their pain while continuing to monitor the agents. The raid is thus presented from two registers at once: a formal search conducted through documents and procedure, and a field of perceived wrongness that Smith reads beyond the agents’ stated purpose.

Smith acts to protect Jill

As Jubal and Heinrich walk toward the pool, two officers flank them. Heinrich looks from a photograph to Jill, whose fear Smith feels increasing. Jubal’s instruction has been unusually clear: protect Jill, and do not be troubled about other matters. Smith understands that he would protect her regardless, but the instruction steadies his attention by freeing him from competing concerns.

When Heinrich points toward Jill and the two flanking officers hurry to her with guns, Smith acts through his Doppelganger. He gives each man the slight twist that makes him topple away; when Heinrich reaches for his weapon, Smith removes him as well. The remaining four officers close in. Smith does not want to twist them and considers that Jubal would prefer a less violent way of stopping them, but he has no body at hand, and stopping them would itself require effort. He responds with four feather-light touches, and they disappear too. The sequence makes the counterattack both decisive and constrained: Smith does not treat every possible action as equivalent, even as he carries out the protection Jubal demanded.

The vehicles disappear; Smith returns

Smith then senses a more intense wrongness at the grounded squad car and makes a rapid decision: the car and its pilot disappear. He almost overlooks the second carrier, still covering the scene from the air. When it descends toward the pool, he stretches his sense of time to its personal limit, inspects the vehicle, and concludes that it is as filled with wrongness as the first. He tips it into neverness, then returns his attention to the group by the pool. The raid’s armed personnel and both vehicles have been removed; no conventional arrest or search follows.

The aftermath is emotionally uneven. Dorcas is sobbing, and Jill holds and soothes her; Anne appears untouched by the feelings Smith senses around him. With the wrongness and disturbance gone, Smith knows Dorcas will recover more quickly with Jill, whose understanding of pain is immediate and complete. He is not certain that he acted rightly at the decisive point, or how Jubal will understand what happened. He leaves the scene, returns to the pool, and puts his body back on, unharmed. Rather than immediately contemplate the men he has moved, he turns back to the task he had been doing. Jill approaches him underwater, and he meets her touch with a kiss—an intimacy he has learned only recently and does not yet fully understand.

Persecution and the church’s response

The raid’s wider significance becomes clearer in the novel’s account of religious organization and state pressure. The Reverend Foster builds a movement suited to a culture described as divided between puritanical public law and intense private interest in sex. His organizational method combines elements borrowed from fraternal orders, Catholicism, political organization, and advertising with a public presentation of primitive Christianity. The church offers an outer level where seekers may remain for years, and a middle church of saved members whose economic ties and public displays of happiness sustain its expansion. When a community attempts to suppress the movement, Fosterites from elsewhere can converge in numbers that overwhelm local jails and police; later prosecutions are difficult to sustain when the actions can be framed as persecution under the law.

Behind the public church lies an unnamed Inner Church: a carefully selected core of priests, lay leaders, record keepers, and policymakers who alone participate in its inner mysteries and are treated as certain of their place in heaven. This account establishes a contrast with the Church of All Worlds, whose members also face repeated efforts to suppress their gatherings but adapt by relocating and reorganizing. In a later conversation, Patty explains that she teaches beginner Martian classes and helps novitiate brothers. She and Dawn, both High Priestesses, also work among Fosterites to show that membership in the Church of All Worlds need not conflict with their existing faith. Patty presents Foster’s kiss to Ben and explains its meaning, alongside the miraculous companion mark placed by Mike.

Mike’s public meetings likewise join spectacle to recruitment. He performs sleight of hand from a magician’s case, acknowledging that he has to offer miracles as the Man from Mars, but inviting those who want to learn to enter a Circle. The process is structured in nine circles: Mike assesses the crowd while performing, identifies possible candidates, and uses helpers to manage the selection. In this later institutional setting, the raid at Jubal’s home foreshadows a recurring conflict between public authority and the church’s survival. Sam describes closing one congregation and reopening under another name—such as the One Faith, the Temple of the Great Pyramid, or the Brotherhood of Baptism—as a means of preserving a disciplined core while building toward a future in which the movement will be too strong to persecute. The home raid is therefore both an immediate test of Smith’s power and an early instance of the larger pressure that the church will answer through adaptation and persistence.