The Cold Equations
This piece of science fiction is best suited to a classroom of thinkers. I have, over my many
years as an ajarn (teacher), enjoyed the discussions and writing I’ve gotten from students at the conclusion of this piece.
Here’s the basics of Tom Godwin’s story, in the year 2178, Barton pilots a spacecraft toward the planet Woden, carrying on board serum for six gravely ill men. But, Barton discovers a stowaway which will create a moral dilemma of the highest degree. The stowaway is eighteen-year old Marilyn, who simply misses her brother so much that she has decided to break the law and find any way she could to go and see him. She is a character than young readers will relate to because of her human qualities, innocence, and beauty.
But, Godwin’s tale is no love story between the young captain and the teenage girl, nor is it a
rescue piece, this is a story made for thinking about the hard decisions which
people have to make in times of crises. This young lady, in her naivety, failed to calculate her own body weight. She is going to crash the spaceship because it was loaded with only the amount of fuel needed to reach Woden. Barton has no desire to kill her; however, he can not sacrifice himself because she can not perform his tasks and to crash the ship will not only kill them, but the six ill people who are dieing while they wait for the drugs he carries.
Marilyn accepts her fate, although in tears and with a great deal of fear, writes a letter to her family, is even briefly able to speak with her brother, but in the end she enters the airlock, and is blown into space where she dies. As I said, no love story and no rescue. The cold equation of the living is that at times we must chose to annihilate something or someone in order to rescue something or someone. It is a brilliant piece and always a hit in my literature class.