Government conceals Smith's disappearance and plans to recapture him

The government’s concealment of Valentine Michael Smith’s disappearance is not merely a denial of inconvenient news: Agnes Douglas organizes a public-relations campaign alongside a plan to seize Smith and return him to custody. By insisting that the genuine Man from Mars is the one the government already claims to possess, while branding the Eastern Coalition’s prospective revelation a fake, she turns the administration’s own deception into the premise for further deception. The effort ultimately gives Jubal Harshaw enough clues to prepare a counterattack.

The Official Story and the Recapture Plan

Agnes’s central instruction is to maintain that the government’s Man from Mars is the only real one, and that any figure produced by the Eastern Coalition will be an impostor. Joseph Douglas doubts they can make that position credible, but Agnes answers that they are already committed to it and must make it stick. The logic is less a defense of verified facts than a political necessity: once the government has adopted the claim, preserving it becomes the objective.

She couples the public story with a physical operation. The administration, she says, should use its Special Service squads to seize Smith again if possible, doing so before the Eastern Coalition can disclose what it knows. She accepts the possibility that Smith might be shot while resisting arrest, treating that outcome as regrettable but not a reason to abandon the plan. Her language casts an attempt to silence or recapture a missing man as an administrative problem to be cleared up for the public good.

Agnes presents the policy as collective necessity rather than personal ambition. When Joseph challenges what she is proposing, she denies that she is proposing anything at all and invokes the greatest good of the greatest number. That justification sits uneasily beside her willingness to tolerate Smith’s death and the deliberate fabrication of a public account. The episode exposes how a language of public welfare can make coercion sound like routine governance.

A Campaign to Manufacture Credibility

Agnes’s response develops beyond a single denial into coordinated reputation management. After reviewing Gil Berquist’s dossier, she orders a campaign to ruin the missing man’s reputation. The choice of target broadens the operation: the administration is not only trying to control what the public believes about Smith, but also to damage the credibility of a person whose disappearance might threaten its account.

She also works directly with Commandant Twitchell of the Special Service squads, meeting with him privately for twenty minutes. He leaves looking troubled and promptly makes life difficult for his executive officer. The narrative does not disclose what passed between Agnes and Twitchell, but the meeting places the political campaign and the coercive apparatus in the same chain of action. Its effect is visible in the commandant’s changed demeanor and behavior, even as its exact instructions remain unreported.

Agnes then orders Sanforth to release another fake Man from Mars stereocast. This broadcast is to carry a rumor attributed to a source close to the administration: Smith is supposedly being transferred, or may already have been transferred, to a sanitarium high in the Andes, where the climate will supposedly be suitable for convalescence. The alternative formulations make the story hard to pin down, while the elaborate medical explanation supplies a plausible-seeming account of why the public cannot see Smith. The missing person is thus replaced in public view by a succession of manufactured images and explanations.

The campaign also serves Joseph’s political interests. Once the media instructions are in place, Agnes considers how to secure Pakistan’s votes for him, urges him to support Pakistan’s claim to most of the Kashmir thorium, and then leaves to address the Daughters of the Second Revolution on motherhood. The juxtaposition connects the fabricated Smith story to the ordinary work of political calculation: public deception, votes, resources, and speeches belong to the same working day.

Jubal Harshaw Detects the Pattern

The false Andes rumor reaches Jubal through a late rebroadcast of the second phony interview with the Man from Mars. Duke has Harshaw’s stereo receiver connected in time for him to see it. Harshaw draws an immediate, if deliberately comic, conclusion from the broadcast and spends the night calling people. At dawn, Dorcas brings him breakfast—six raw eggs beaten into brandy—while he reflects that a long life has left him acquainted with nearly everyone important enough to contact in a crisis.

Harshaw does not intend to use his leverage immediately. He has prepared what he thinks of as a time bomb, but plans to trigger it only if those in power force him to act. He recognizes the government’s possible argument that Smith is incompetent to care for himself, and even agrees that Smith would be judged legally insane and medically psychopathic by ordinary standards. Yet Harshaw considers those categories beside the point: Smith has made a profound adjustment to an alien society, and Harshaw wants to determine whether, as an adult, he can make another comparably radical adjustment to human life. The political effort to regain control of Smith therefore collides with Harshaw’s decision to treat him not simply as a custody problem but as a person undergoing a difficult transition.

The authorities’ effort to hide Smith also produces an evidentiary trap. Ben Caxton visits the Bethesda Medical Center with his lawyer and the Fair Witness James Oliver Cavendish, and the three are taken to see the supposed Man from Mars. Gillian Boardman protests that they could not have reached her floor without her knowing, but Jubal clarifies the crucial distinction: they were shown the fake actor in a stereocast, not the real Smith. Cavendish’s presence lends weight to the report, yet does not mean that he exposed the deception; as Jubal explains, even Cavendish will not say that he caught them out. The episode leaves the government’s performance intact for the moment, while making its staged nature legible to those who can distinguish the missing man from his official substitute.

Consequences and Significance

The concealment campaign joins three methods that might otherwise appear separate: denial of the Eastern Coalition’s anticipated disclosure, manufactured media evidence, and an attempted recovery backed by Special Service squads. Its sequence reveals that the fake broadcasts are not incidental publicity but part of a broader strategy to control both Smith’s public identity and his physical whereabouts. The proposed sanitarium story, in particular, turns absence into an apparently benevolent medical transfer.

The operation nevertheless creates vulnerabilities. The more detailed the administration’s invented account becomes, the more it leaves traces—a rebroadcast, an implausibly specific rumor, a staged hospital visit—that can be pieced together by Harshaw and others. Harshaw’s overnight calls and his untriggered threat show that the government does not possess an uncontested narrative. Its attempt to convert Smith into an object of state management instead helps set the terms of a wider confrontation over truth, authority, and who may decide what is best for him.