I love Heinlein -- I prefer his books to his shorts, though -- and this story was complete Heinlein in that it starts out relatively small/simple and blooms into a MUCH larger story. The common aspect of betting for something that runs through a lot of Heinlein fiction that I've read was represented here, though I think that if this was someone's first or second foray into Heinlein s/he might not understand the concept.
Personally I think Heinlein must be rolling over in his grave so frequently these days that he could power an artificial gravity system. You can tell, reading his books, where he readjusts his thinking as to what the future's going to be like every few years or so. Eventually, as with The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, I think he gave up and just slammed all his futures together because he knew that none of them would come true no matter how much he wished for it. I would love to see just about any Heinlein future come to fruition because, as dark as some of the things were in his books, they all had this positive feel to them, like if the main character could just do something, go somewhere, complete a task, that everything would work out better. You see it in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Friday, Time Enough For Love, Job: A Comedy of Justice, and the like. If I wanted any human to be immortal just so he could keep producing great stories, I would want that human to be Heinlein.
So, in short: I liked the story, though not as much as his books.
Not a huge fan of Steve's "big dude" voice, but that's not such a big deal.