[j. d. worthington]

I still find that particular scene sticks. It just doesn't play properly, given Mary's reaction in other instances up to that point. It just doesn't ring true for her character as presented so far, nor does anything that comes after make it believable that there wouldn't be that momentary flash of anger -- almost subliminal, but there. That's simply a normal mammalian reaction, period. It lies far, far below the conscious levels, down in the very basic structure of the brain, and is most likely tied to the "fight-or-flight" response -- a survival mechanism, in other words; and Mary was most definitely a survivor-type. I just think this is one instance where Heinlein goofed, period. I can much more easily buy what a similar instance of a man-woman confrontation in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls; that one rings honestly on both sides. This one clunked; it was artificial. It is also a case where it would have taken nothing more than a very brief indication of such a response -- a single line or even phrase -- to have made it much more believable. Again, I would simply say that this is an instance of Heinlein letting his agenda override his good sense as a writer. Her other instances of "submission", on the other hand, make sense given the way the dynamics have changed as time passes; it gives a chance for a new response (based on different emotional dynamics, so that the "fight-or-flight" doesn't kick in where Sam's concerned -- barring an act of brutality on his part) to become "second nature". It's a subtle point, but it leaps out at me as flatly wrong to the writer in me; it breaks verisimilitude completely and draws attention to itself, so that it has to be justified and explained... and that is generally an indication that it was a bad move (unless the writer is normally given to such tactics, to deliberately draw attention to them and make the reader pause frequently to ponder a character's actions -- which interferes with the flow of narrative; Heinlein tended to be exactly the opposite, always having a good narrative flow, even in his more didactic work).

As for whether we can "know" about the other matters ... well, we can't "know" anything. That's getting caught up in semantics. But, as far as we can know anything at all, the indications are that these things, too, are moving into the realm of the explicable, with the data piling up to give as much of a definitive answer on them as we can have on much of anything. We're in the early stages of that, but our growing understanding of genetics plus our understanding of the developmental stages of the brain and mental activities indicates strongly that, within the next century, this question is likely to be resolved into the "phenomena" category, rather than "noumena"... and will be taken out of the realm of philosophy into physics and biology. However, during Heinlein's lifetime, we were only seeing the first glimmers of that, and even there it was somewhat debatable ground (though without the predisposition to that belief, the indications were entirely against any sort of life-after-death).