The Martian Delegation and Earth Hold a Public Summit

The Martian Delegation and Earth Hold a Public Summit is the Executive Palace conference in which the diplomatic status of Mike Smith becomes a public test of Earth’s treatment of Mars. Rather than allow the gathering to define Mike as a private visitor, Jubal Harshaw uses protocol, ceremony, and the proceedings themselves to make the competing possibilities visible: Mike is either an ordinary individual, or a sovereign whose presence represents an inhabited world and its people. The summit gives that argument a public stage, but adjourns before Secretary General Douglas resolves it.

Arrival and Purpose

The Martian delegation, organized by Jubal alongside the Inside Straight Sodality, Unlimited, landed on the flat of the Executive Palace shortly before ten the next morning. Mike had not worried about the trip’s purpose. In the chartered Flying Greyhound, he sat in the crowded astrodome between Jill and Dorcas, with an arm around each, while they pointed out sights and talked to him. For Mike, this was his first meaningful view of Terran civilization beyond the limited surroundings of the house and garden where he had been staying; the journey itself was a delighted, intimate introduction to a world he had not yet been able to take in.

Jubal’s party included Mike, Jill, Dorcas, Miriam, the Fair Witness, and Ben Caxton. Jubal had arranged a bus to collect them, but ordered it away once they arrived, asking Duke to bring it back when called. The landing area was not crowded with reporters, but an executive assistant immediately tried to direct Jubal to Douglas’s private office before the conference. Jubal refused. He would not let officials substitute a private conversation or press arrangements for the public meeting the delegation had come to attend.

When an official insisted that he had instructions, Jubal dismissed those instructions and stated the delegation’s purpose plainly: if the conference was not ready, they would meet the press in the conference room. He also objected that Mike was being kept standing on a windy roof and demanded someone capable of leading them directly inside. The exchange established the approach Jubal would maintain throughout the summit: the delegation would not wait passively for Earth’s officials to determine the terms on which Mars could be heard.

Taking the Conference Room

The conference room was crowded with reporters and technicians. Mike was recognized at once, and although Sanforth protested, the crowd pressed toward him. Jill, Dorcas, and the other women formed a protective passage through the press; Jubal got Mike to the large table and seated him with Jill and Dorcas beside him, while Miriam and the Fair Witness sat behind. He did not try to prevent photographs or questions. He had warned Mike that people might behave strangely and, in particular, not to make anyone or anything disappear or stop unless Jill instructed him. Mike endured the confusion gravely, reassured by Jill’s hand, while Jubal relied on his literal, concise answers to frustrate attempts to extract more from him than a brief encounter could yield.

A dispute over the seating chart made the question of status concrete. The protocol officer had arranged the table without granting the delegation a substantial place. Jubal took the paper, marked out half the main table for Mike, and added his own name as acting for Valentine Michael Smith. When the Chief of Protocol, LaRue, questioned whether so small a delegation needed that much space, Jubal said that without it they would leave and Douglas would be responsible for breaking up the conference by treating the Man from Mars rudely. The demand was not simply for room: it required the government to acknowledge, in the arrangement of the meeting, that Mike’s position was not that of an incidental guest.

Jubal extended the same challenge to the symbols of state. He pointed out that the Federation had a banner behind Douglas’s place but no corresponding flag for Mars. The Martians did not use flags, he conceded, yet Earth could improvise one: a white field bearing a red human symbol for Mars, made with a clean sheet and paint. He likewise asked that a Martian anthem be played. Since no such anthem was available, he proposed using the Mars movement from The Ten Planets Symphony. Jubal presented these compromises as a response to the officials’ decision to make a formal occasion of what had been intended as a small, informal business meeting. If the government staged a ceremony, he argued, it had to supply the forms that would make the delegation’s standing legible.

LaRue agreed to reserve half the table but hesitated to promise the flag and music, saying he did not think he had authority to grant sovereign honors. Jubal treated the hesitation as a refusal and threatened to return when Douglas was less busy and there were fewer visitors. His apparent difficulty rising from his chair sharpened the contrast between his feigned frailty and the firmness of his ultimatum. The confrontation ended not with a completed walkout but with the delegation still in the Palace: officials produced an improvised Martian flag, and the ceremony proceeded.

Ceremony and the Question of Equality

Before the Secretary General’s entrance, Jubal arranged for the President of the United States to sit beside Mike. He invited the President to join him, then presented him to Mike as the President of the United States. The improvised flag was being set up behind them as the music began and the Secretary General was announced. The sequence placed a national leader beside Mike before Douglas entered, making the coming encounter part of a broader public display rather than a private exchange between officials.

Jubal had considered leaving Mike seated when Douglas entered, but rejected the idea because it might appear to put Mike above the Secretary General. Instead, he signaled Mike to rise with him. When Douglas came in and began to sit, Jubal signaled Mike to sit at the same time as Douglas. After a respectful pause, the others sat. The timing made the two men’s positions visibly parallel without claiming that Mike outranked Douglas.

The Mars movement then began. Jubal rose, and Douglas rose promptly as well, but Mike remained seated because Jubal had not signaled him to stand. Mike neither understood the ceremony nor appeared embarrassed; he followed the directions of his water brother. His stillness became the sharpest part of the protocol argument. When the music ended, Mike stood, bowed, and sat down as the others did. Jubal understood the gesture as a sovereign’s acknowledgment of a salute offered to him, contrasting it with the customary response of a democratic political head, who stands for his country’s anthem as a citizen rather than receiving it as a sovereign. The sequence made the competing interpretations of Mike’s status visible without requiring him to explain them.

Douglas welcomed Mike in carefully composed terms, calling Earth his home as much as Mars, the planet of his birth, and referring to Mars as a good neighbor. The address was cordial but, as Jubal judged it, left unresolved whether Mike was being welcomed as a sovereign, a tourist, or a returning citizen. The official welcome thus offered warmth without deciding the legal and political question that had shaped the staging of the room.

Mike’s Address and Jubal’s Argument

At Jubal’s cue, Mike began addressing the Secretary General in Martian. Before the audience’s consternation could grow, he identified his addressee in English, then returned to Martian. In English he thanked the Secretary General for the welcome and conveyed greetings to Earth’s peoples from the Ancient Ones of Mars, shifting again between the two languages. The address let Mike speak as a representative of Mars, but its alternating languages also underscored how much the human audience depended on interpretation and on the political framing supplied by others.

The Larkin Decision surfaced as the meeting was ending. Assemblyman Kung interrupted Douglas and asked about the decision. Jubal took the question before Douglas could answer, saying that it should be put to the government, while explaining how he understood the honors paid that day: as elementary politeness toward the Ancient Ones of Mars, not as an application of the Larkin precedent. He argued that Smith was, in a sense beyond human experience, the planet Mars—or, more precisely, the entire Martian race. In Smith’s person, Jubal said, the Ancient Ones were visiting Earth; honors to him were honors to them, and harm to him would be harm to them.

Jubal carefully separated this claim from the legal argument over the Larkin Decision. He maintained that no responsible person had argued that the precedent applied to an inhabited planet. The sovereign honors, in his account, were instead a prudent and gracious symbolic act toward Mars, whose ancient rulers would notice how Earth treated their ambassador. When Kung said he was not frightened, Jubal replied that he had not expected to frighten him and pointed out that Kung’s opinion did not control the planet’s welfare. The argument gave the ceremony a consequence beyond etiquette: how Earth treated Mike could be read as how it treated the Martians he embodied.

Adjournment and Unresolved Stakes

After the exchange, Jubal said that the long public appearance had fatigued him and asked Douglas to recess the talks while the delegation awaited his decision. The meeting adjourned, but Jubal could not immediately take his party away: the American President and Senator Boone both wanted to speak with Mike, recognizing the political value of being seen on intimate terms with the Man from Mars while the world continued to watch through stereovision.

The summit therefore achieved a public presentation of equality without securing a final diplomatic settlement. The seating, improvised flag, music, and carefully timed gestures made the question of sovereignty impossible to ignore; Douglas’s address and Jubal’s distinction between legal precedent and symbolic recognition left its answer pending. The conference’s central tension remained in view at adjournment: Mike could be treated as a private individual, but Jubal had forced Earth’s officials and the watching public to confront the possibility that their treatment of him carried meaning for Mars as a whole.