They would never let him alone. He realized that was part of the plot against him—never to leave him in peace, never to give him a chance to mull over the lies they had told him, time enough to pick out the flaws, and to figure out the truth for himself.
The opening of this story situates “They” as the objects of a thought process which trends toward the paranoid. It is a testament to the pervasive quality of life in the modern world, however, that the words which introduce the reader to this protagonist of this story are ones with which most everybody can identify. Written a century earlier and whoever “he” is would likely be firmly established by the end of this paragraph as a hysteric perhaps at home in the lunatic world of Edgar Allan Poe. But even by 1941, hysteria had undergone transformation. The recognition and identification with this mysterious “he” is what makes the story work for modern readers.
"See that. One-sixth gravity. When I was tending bar on earth my bunions gave me the dickens all the time. Here I weigh only thirty-five pounds. I like it on the Moon."
“Columbus was a Dope” seems to have nothing to do with science fiction until its ending. This is one of those stories written in Heinlein’s attempt to mainstream science fiction. The bar in which a few men sit around talking could be set anywhere at any time. The actual location only becomes apparent in the final lines.
"Potty, something funny is happening to the sunset."
Unlike the final line of “Columbus was a Dope” in which the last line becomes the twist itself which explains why everything before was significant, this observation made Meade is the set-up to the tragic implication of what comes next. One can argue that the ending might be strengthened in a way by ending the story here. The ambiguity would be frustrating, but it would allow for a greater interaction between writer and reader. Heinlein was not a big believer in ambiguous endings, however.
“It’s a shock to have it proved to you that you can’t resist seducing yourself.”
Even just the simple fact of listing the name of the narrator of this story is an exercise in confusion. Time travel literature is notorious for being confusing in the first place, but add in a plot involving a person born with the genitalia of both who—through a series of events far too complicated to explain here—is capable of becoming their own parent. Yeah, time travel, right? Always an opportunity for a writer to test the stability of the envelope of reason and the tensile resiliency of the suspension of disbelief. Even with the additional quality of a character being able to seduce himself/herself, however, Heinlein's story remains highly regarded as a model for licking some of the more prickly problems associated with playing around among the time-space continuum.
