Jubal E. Harshaw

Jubal E. Harshaw is a popular author, lawyer, physician, scientist, gourmet, and self-styled pessimist whose life among beautiful secretaries and private comforts conceals a mind ready for serious work. His importance lies in the combination: Harshaw is both a skeptical diagnostician, alert to institutional power and evidentiary standards, and a political nonconformist willing to put his reputation and resources against the planetary government. When Valentine Michael Smith enters his household, that combination makes Harshaw a protector, examiner, and interpreter of the unfamiliar world Smith brings with him.

Identity and Working Habits

Harshaw is introduced at his home in the Poconos, seated beside his swimming pool while his three secretaries—Anne, Miriam, and Dorcas—swim. He regards their beauty and competence as an instance of efficiency: utility and beauty should be combined. His household is informal enough that last names are little used, and even the rumor that one secretary might be his granddaughter is unresolved. The scene establishes Harshaw’s comic self-indulgence, but also the steady labor beneath it: he is working, with one part of his mind occupied by composition while most of his attention appears to rest on the pool.

His deliberately outrageous account of writing—he claims to disconnect his cerebrum and enlist his body in the process—fits the gap between his public persona and his actual capacity. The joke presents Harshaw as a man who enjoys puncturing solemnity, not as someone incapable of concentration. When events demand it, he can turn from private amusement to sustained medical and political judgment.

Taking Smith into His Care

Jill drives to Harshaw’s house with a young companion and Smith’s rigid body concealed beneath a blanket in the back seat. Harshaw initially examines the apparent corpse clinically. He judges that Smith’s body temperature has fallen to the temperature of the air and that the stiffness is unusual; when Jill insists Smith is not dead, Harshaw and Larry help lift him from the car and lay him on the grass by the pool. Dorcas fetches Harshaw’s stethoscope, switches it on, and increases its gain. After listening for a heartbeat, Harshaw tells Jill gently that Smith is beyond his help. Her answer identifies the body as the Man from Mars and conveys how hard she has tried to save him.

Harshaw’s medical conclusion does not close the matter. After seeing a rebroadcast of the government’s second false interview with the Man from Mars, and hearing a rumor that Smith may be moved to the Andes, he connects the public deception to a danger: the government can claim Smith is unable to care for himself and take him back into captivity. Harshaw agrees that, by ordinary medical and legal standards, Smith could be described as psychotic and legally insane. But he considers those labels inadequate to the case. Smith has already adjusted to an alien society as an infant; Harshaw’s central question is whether the same person, now an adult with established habits, can make another radical adjustment to an entirely unfamiliar human society.

Harshaw therefore takes a renewed interest in medical practice and intends to find out rather than assume that conventional diagnoses settle the issue. His response also has a political edge: he prepares a “time bomb” to use only if the authorities force his hand, and takes pleasure in the prospect of obstructing the government. His protection of Smith is consequently both a clinical inquiry and an act of resistance, grounded in Harshaw’s view that neither legal categories nor official power should substitute for understanding the person at stake.

Testing and Evidence

Harshaw does not accept Jill’s account of Smith’s abilities merely because he believes she is sincere. After Smith has again gone to the bottom of the pool, Harshaw tells Jill to retrieve him and bring him to the study. He first says that he wants to see whether Smith can repeat the feat at will and that they do not need an audience; then he revises the plan, requesting Anne in her official capacity as a Fair Witness and Duke as well. The reversal matters: Harshaw wants an independent observer and a record, not simply a private demonstration that could later be dismissed as a dream or a hypnotic delusion.

He makes the distinction explicit. Jill may be telling the truth, he says, but dreams and hypnotic delusions are also true experiences in a limited sense. To determine what kind of truth is involved, he arranges for a Fair Witness and cameras to observe what happens in the room. The testing is thus designed around competing explanations and public verifiability. It also serves Harshaw’s practical purpose: reliable evidence may help him force the authorities to abandon their next move and may offer a way to help Ben Caxton.

Harshaw’s scrutiny is not cold detachment. When Smith takes longer than expected because he has tied his shoestrings together and painstakingly works out how to untangle them, Jill reassures him, combs his hair, and brings him to the study. Harshaw greets him as a son and asks him to sit. The scene sets a domestic tenderness beside the investigator’s discipline: Smith’s difficulty is treated as a specific problem to learn from, not a reason to shame or abandon him.

Reading Religious Power and Organization

Harshaw’s analysis of organized religion is sharpened by the novel’s account of Reverend Foster and the New Revelation. Foster’s magnetic authority, the American tension between restrictive public morality and intense private interest in sex, and the church’s carefully layered organization all form part of the historical backdrop Harshaw’s household later has to interpret. The New Revelation combines borrowed organizational forms and religious materials with a public promise of happiness. Its outer church welcomes seekers; the middle church gathers the saved and sustains an expanding network; an unnamed Inner Church reserves leadership, policy, records, and its inner mysteries for the most dedicated.

That structure has political as well as spiritual force. Fosterites can converge on communities resisting them, overwhelm local efforts at suppression, and make prosecutions difficult to sustain. Foster’s selection of the Inner Church is also described as deliberate: he seeks committed leaders and takes care that married candidates enter as couples, while avoiding a structure in which women are kept exclusively by one man. This account presents the church not simply as a set of beliefs but as an organization shaped by recruitment, discipline, legal strategy, and the management of jealousy and loyalty.

Later, Patty explains to Ben how Fosterite members help demonstrate that the Church of All Worlds does not conflict with their faith. She teaches beginner Martian and assists novices; she and Dawn, both high priestesses, use their standing as Fosterites to make that case. Patty shows Ben Foster’s kiss and its miraculous companion, the mark placed by Mike, explaining how these signs help prepare people to commit themselves to higher circles. Harshaw’s interpretive world therefore includes not only the earlier example of Foster’s church but also the practical work of translating between religious communities as Mike’s church develops.

Smith’s Church and Harshaw’s Historical Perspective

Harshaw’s household hears how Mike combines performance, selection, and instruction in meetings of the Church of All Worlds. Mike uses his carnival experience to perform sleight of hand, then presents those limited tricks as only a small measure of what members might learn. Beneath the entertainment, he assesses the audience: Patty explains that he is identifying which people may be ready for further instruction, while Duke relays information about promising candidates and Dawn helps manage the next step. Membership is organized into nine circles, and seekers are not told of a more advanced circle until they are ready to enter it.

The pattern recalls religious systems that make access gradual, but the meeting is not presented as mere spectacle. Mike’s patter turns curiosity toward commitment, while the circles make spiritual advancement depend on continued effort and training. Patty says Fosterite visitors who recognize Foster’s kiss, have seen Mike’s miracles, and are ready to work may be moved to climb higher. Harshaw’s importance in this context is as an observer who understands that a religious movement’s future depends on more than its leader’s charisma: it also depends on how the movement selects, educates, and retains people.

That organizational question becomes urgent as the church faces public hostility. Sam describes the congregation’s willingness to close one church and reappear under another name: the Church of All Worlds may give way to the One Faith, then the Temple of the Great Pyramid, then the Brotherhood of Baptism. Each disruption, he argues, can still produce a disciplined core that cannot be easily destroyed, together with advanced pilgrims who can be contacted and reunited later. He contrasts that emerging network with Mike’s uncertain beginnings a little over a year earlier, when he had only three untrained priestesses-by-courtesy. Harshaw judges the strategy plausible and compares the scale of an early movement with the small number of disciples associated with Jesus. His final perspective is neither complacent nor defeatist: persecution is expected to intensify, but time and accumulated organization may eventually make the church too strong to suppress.

Narrative Role and Significance

Harshaw connects several kinds of authority without fully submitting to any of them. His medical training gives him a vocabulary for Smith’s condition, but he refuses to confuse a diagnosis with a complete explanation. His legal knowledge helps him recognize how the government might use a claim of incompetence to justify renewed custody. His skepticism demands a Fair Witness and cameras, while his political instinct prepares him to resist official power. In each case, his characteristic habit is to test what institutions call settled against the particular evidence in front of him.

The same combination shapes his view of religion. He can recognize the machinery of religious organization—the outer seeker, the committed membership, the inner leadership, and the mobilization of followers—without reducing Mike’s movement to its machinery. The contrast between Foster’s established system and the Church of All Worlds in its early, precarious growth lets Harshaw see both the risks of institutional power and the practical strength that discipline can provide. His narrative role is that of a worldly interpreter whose humor and appetite for independence make room for genuine care: he takes Smith seriously enough to question him, protect him, and imagine that a new form of life might survive the forces gathering against it.