S.S.

The S.S. is the Federation’s security service, presented in the novel as both a coercive state presence and a practical channel for managing threats around Mike. At Jubal Harshaw’s house, its patrols protect the household while also making the cost of Mike’s unwanted public attention visible; elsewhere, the service is considered as a resource for handling suspicious packages and repeated threats.

Security and the Harshaw Household

After the press lost interest in the story, thousands of people outside the news business continued to focus on Mike. Joseph Douglas tried to protect Mike’s privacy, and S.S. troopers patrolled Harshaw’s fence. An S.S. car circled above the grounds and challenged cars attempting to land. The security presence kept visitors out, but Harshaw resented having to live behind guards.

The perimeter did not stop the flow of unwanted contact. Mail and telephone calls still reached the house, so Harshaw changed the household’s telephone number, routed calls through an answering service, and kept the phone set to refuse and record calls most of the time. The contrast is central to the S.S.’s limited function in this episode: its patrols could control access to the grounds, but they could not prevent strangers from trying to reach Mike by other means.

Handling Threats and Dangerous Mail

The volume of correspondence forced Harshaw to devise a system for sorting Mike’s mail. Fourth-class packages became a particular concern after one exploded prematurely at the village post office. The blast damaged public notices and a sign, though the postmaster and his assistant were not injured. Harshaw considered sending Mike’s fourth-class mail to S.S. bomb-disposal specialists, who also performed that service for the Secretary General.

That proposed intervention proved unnecessary. Mike could detect a sense of wrongness in a package without opening it. The parcels were left in a heap just inside the gate; after the postman departed, Mike examined them from a distance and made harmful packages disappear. Larry then carried the remainder to the house. Harshaw preferred this arrangement to conventional precautions such as soaking, opening packages in darkness, or X-raying them. The episode places the S.S. alongside Mike’s ability as a possible safeguard, but the actual screening is carried out by Mike, not by the service.

First-class letters were sorted separately. Harshaw classified begging letters for disposal, business offers for forwarding to Joseph Douglas, and non-threatening crackpot letters for selective circulation or disposal. Threatening letters were kept unanswered, while second and later threats from any one source were to be turned over to the S.S. The procedure makes the agency a recipient of escalated threats rather than the household’s routine handler of every intrusion.

Religious Conflict and Public Pressure

The novel’s account of Fosterism describes a movement that had learned to withstand official suppression. Reverend Foster built an organization drawing on multiple institutional models and maintained an outer church, a prosperous middle church, and a tightly controlled inner church. When communities tried to suppress Fosterite activity, members from elsewhere converged on them; prosecutions, the narrative notes, were made difficult to sustain under national law. The S.S.’s appearance at Harshaw’s property therefore belongs to a wider setting in which government security and religious movements confront one another, though the evidence does not identify the service as the author of the earlier prosecutions or suppression campaigns.

The Church of All Worlds later faces repeated opposition and dispersal. Sam describes the congregation moving between names and locations as authorities and local institutions close in, while a disciplined core survives and remains reachable for future reunions. His account treats persecution as an ongoing political condition rather than a single defeat. The S.S. is part of the institutional world surrounding this conflict, but the passage does not specify that it directs the Church’s closure or the congregation’s moves.

Function and Limits

Across these episodes, the S.S. has concrete state responsibilities: guarding a prominent household, maintaining a security perimeter, and providing bomb-disposal services. Harshaw’s mail rules also make it the designated recipient when threats recur. Yet the service cannot resolve the underlying public fixation on Mike, stop correspondence from arriving, or substitute for the unusual means by which Mike identifies dangerous packages.

The organization consequently appears less as a fully described institution than as a pressure point between public authority and private life. Its patrols help secure Harshaw’s grounds, while their necessity underscores how fame turns a home into a protected site. In the religious material, meanwhile, the broader persistence of organized persecution gives that security presence a political context without establishing further specific actions by the S.S.