The conflict in this chapter has to do with Harry's mistrust of Mars and his fear of of his family changing somehow from Earthlings into Martians. This fear becomes acute when word reaches Mars of a nuclear war on Earth, and Harry realizes that he and the other humans living on Mars have been effectively marooned on the planet. At first, he is determined to build a rocket himself so that he can escape, but eventually he becomes more and more Martian, both in outlook and (eventually) physically.

In a broader sense, the conflict has to do with otherness. Harry knows, from the moment he gets off the rocket, that Mars is a different place and that changing the names of mountains and canals into Earth names—or building Earth-style houses—will not change the alien nature of the planet.

As colonists, the humans want to appropriate and exploit the Martian landscape, but somehow these efforts seem irrelevant. Like the human names that Harry and his family come to reject in favor of Martian names, Harry and his family come to forget about their human roots. The colonizers are in fact the ones who are colonized. This is more than a simple case of "going native": they become natives.

There are a number of ways you can understand what happens to Harry and his family. Their transformation into Martians seems to be for the best. Harry and his wife become slim and young. There is a sense that somehow they are not "alive" in the same way the humans who eventually come to "rescue" them are; their transformation from human to Martian is spiritual as well as physical. The otherness that Harry feared so much, in fact, turns out to be a kind of heaven.

The conflict in this story is between cultures, both literally and symbolically. Literally, it is between the people from Earth and those from Mars. Symbolically, it is between conquerors and natives, such as Europeans and Native Americans.  How it is resolved depends on where it is in the story and sequence. By that I mean, at first the Earth humans win, renaming things, but then Mars changes them into Martians, and the names change with them.