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Page 179
Rationals in their relative poverty of perception. Such perception wasn't a thing of the mind; it was most characteristic of Emotionals. Odeen was a Rational of Rationals, proud of reasoning rather than feeling. . . ." Rationals are embarrassed by experiencing emotions. Odeen, for instance, when he first meets Tritt feels embarrassed by an inner warmth and the feeling that there was something Tritt wanted that was utterly divorced from thought.
Rationals are not without flaws. Asimov portrayed them as unable to imagine the agony of an Earth destroyed by a nova, or even, in their lack of empathy, being unable to conceive of the humanity of an alien. The final melting of the triad into a Hard One may not be so much the uniting of the parts of the psyche but the blending of flawed humans into a unified whole person combining male and female attributes, as well as jointly shared parental instincts, into one rational being.
The Parentals are less easy to assign sex. Asimov calls them "he," and Dua calls her Parental "Daddy." It would be too easy to assign them female roles; in any case, such an assignment rings false. Perhaps the Parental is an amalgam of the male and female impulses to procreation and family building. Asimov himself, according to the evidence of his autobiography, was a concerned and devoted father. The characteristics displayed by Tritt seem relatively unappealing; he is stubborn and uncaring about anything except his own satisfaction; to be sure, his satisfaction is essential to the continuance of the species, which otherwise might well have died out long ago. In the para-Universe, with its falling birthrate, this instinctive behavior seems essential, and Asimov grants it its necessary place.
Finally, Dua, the focus of Part II, is different from other Emotionals. As a female, Dua is concerned with rationality. She finds Odeen more fascinating, much more interesting than Tritt, and her fellow Emotionals are hopeless. "Dua was so non-Emotional an Emotional!" Odeen thinks. She is curious, she wants to find out why things are as they are, and she enjoys having Odeen teach her as much as Odeen enjoys teaching her. Odeen is pleased that she is different, pleased that she wants to share his intellectual life, and pleased that he is pleased. Without going too far into an analysis of Asimov's personal life, one might speculate that he was comparing his first wife and her lack of interest in his work with his second wife (a physician, a psychiatrist, and after their marriage a novelist as well) and her ability to share his interests and intellectual life.
These attitudes may not endear Asimov to feminists. But if Part II has a human message as well as a novelistic one, it may be in support of the

 
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