Musings on the Cold Equations
It seemed, almost,
that she still sat small and bewildered and frightened on the metal box beside
him, her words echoing hauntingly clear in the void she had left behind her:
I didn’t do
anything to die for—I didn’t do anything—
-Tom Godwin, The
Cold Equations
Say what you like about him – and a
great deal has been said, as is the wont of our woke-world, over the past
few months – John Campbell was one hell of an editor. He understood, at a primal level, what made a
story actually work; he understood how to subvert expectations to make The Cold Equations a story that is still
talked about nearly seventy years after it was written. Indeed, it is the ending – so unexpected, by
the standards of the time – that caused most of the comment. At base, we don’t want an innocent girl to die.
And yet, die she must.
The basic plot is relatively simple. On a colony world in an otherwise empty star
system, in a universe where spaceflight and FTL travel is possible but
expensive and difficult, a disease is spreading. A vaccine must be delivered immediately or six
men will die. In order to do this, an
interstellar transport ship must drop out of FTL and launched an emergency
dispatch ship (the EDS) to the colony world.
Because fuel is expensive, there is only a limited supply on the EDS;
the pilot, Barton, is going to have to remain on the colony world until he can
be recovered later. Because of the cold
equations of interplanetary spaceflight, the ship cannot take on more mass (such as a stowaway) or it will miss the
planet, condemning the pilot and the colonists to death. As stowaways will always try to space the
pilot first, the pilot has a blaster and orders to shoot to kill before he is
killed himself. And Barton discovers,
when he is committed to his flight, that he has a stowaway.
But this is no desperate man, condemned to kill or be
killed. The stowaway is Marilyn Lee
Cross, an eighteen-year-old girl. She
doesn’t want to steal the fuel, she just wants to see her brother … a
colonist. She’s an innocent abroad. She doesn’t realise – unlike everyone else in
the story – that she has not only walked into danger, she has walked into
certain death. If she stays on the ship,
it will crash and eight people will die.
Her presence guarantees it.
Barton tries, desperately, to work the figures so everyone might live,
but he draws a blank. There’s no way to
cheat the cold equations. She says
goodbye to her brother, then walks into the airlock. Her death saves seven other lives.
Godwin works hard to tug on our heartstrings throughout
the story, building up an expectation that – at the end – Marilyn will be
saved. She’s an innocent girl; she’s no
spoilt brat, she declares herself ready to face the consequences … unaware,
all too unaware, that those consequences include certain death. (By the standards of the story’s era, when
men were expected to protect women, she’s the last person anyone would want to die.) She talks of her hopes and dreams, slowly
realising that they’ll never come to pass.
And in the end, she redeems herself the only way she can … by walking
to her death. Her suicide saves Barton
from having to kill her in order that seven other men might live.
It is no surprise that the story is controversial, both
when it was published and now. By the
standards of the time, Barton would have found a solution – probably with
undiscovered super-science – and the story would have been forgotten. By now, with more advanced technology and
different social attitudes, the story has been branded sexist and misogynist,
with Godwin (or Campbell) choosing to overlook possible solutions so the girl
must die. (One commenter, according to the
foreword to the Baen edition, included a suggestion of pederasty.) And yet, without the grim ending, the story
would not be so well known. I would kill to write a story that remained in
the public mind for sixty years.
Campbell knew his job and he did it very well.
Half of the story, naturally, rests on the technical
limits, as they were known in those days.
The EDS apparently cannot be flown on automatic (although that would
have made matters worse, as there would be no one on the ship to explain to Marilyn
that she had to die; worse, perhaps, she might suffocate on an airless ship,
her body still adding its weight to the load and ensuring certain doom.) There would also be obvious limits to how
much fuel the mothership could carry (regardless of the cost factor) and how
much they could risk giving to the EDS without cutting their own safety margin
to the bone. Indeed, many of the little
quibbles with the story can be resolved by bearing in mind that the EDS was not
designed to carry the vaccine; it was
pressed into service on an emergency basis.
The other half rests on social attitudes and
awareness. Everyone in the story, except
Marilyn, understands the dangers of stowing away on a spacecraft. They know this because they live in space,
they work in space; they understand, at a very primal level, the dangers of
space. A sign marked ‘UNAUTHORIZED
PERSONNEL KEEP OUT!’ is more than enough for them, on the grounds that no one
would erect such a sign without good reason.
Marilyn, on the other hand, was born on Earth and was a mere passenger
on the mothership, unaware of the dangers except at an intellectual level. On Earth, perhaps within the Sol System, she
could be rescued. Outside Earth, the
technology and resources to save her simply don’t exist. Indeed, this may also explain why Barton
didn’t bother to search the ship for stowaways before casting off, reasoning –
correctly, from his point of view – that no one would be stupid enough to
hijack the EDS when there was literally nowhere
to go. The empty colony system has
no place that can and will take the fuel and hide the pilot with no questions
asked. (The downside of asking ‘who
would be stupid enough to do [whatever]?’ is that there are people too
ignorant – like Marilyn – to realise that they’re doing something incredibly
stupid.)
There are no easy ways out of the problem, as far as I
can see. And indeed, most of the
proposed solutions are simply impractical.
For example:
Point: Marilyn
could land the ship herself, perhaps following directions from the planet or
the mothership (or simple remote control).
Indeed, a fertile young girl might be more important to the colony than the older pilot. Barton can commit suicide to save her life.
Counterpoint: There’s
no suggestion that Marilyn can fly the ship (if she had pilot training, she
would have understood the dangers), nor is there any suggestion that the ship
can be guided from the ground/mothership.
The mothership would presumably have other pilots, but the
speed-of-light delay would make it impossible to guide the ship safely; there
might not be a pilot on the ground. (This
also raises the issue of why Barton should
die to save Marilyn from the consequences of her own mistake, but it’s fairly
clear that Barton would have done so if that was an option.)
Point: There
are plenty of items on the EDS that could be jettisoned instead, balancing the
cold equations.
Counterpoint: The
items may be vitally important (an acceleration couch, for example), too small
to make a difference (pen and paper) or simply impossible to dismantle and remove
in time.
Point: Marilyn
and Barton could amputate themselves, throwing out their limbs to balance the
cold equations. Marilyn could survive
without her arms and legs …
Counterpoint(s): First,
there is no suggestion that either of them have the medical training and
equipment to perform several amputations successfully. (My wife, a doctor, said she’d be very
hesitant to try, even if things really were
desperate. Second, what sort of life
would Marilyn (and Barton) have on the colony world, if they were literally
limbless? Death might be preferable.
As far as I can tell, giving the setting, the outcome is
inevitable. There simply isn’t any
solution that will allow everyone to
live. It is for that reason, I suspect,
that most negative commenters choose to nitpick the setting itself, pointing
out that the whole universe seems designed by criminally-negligent robber
barons. There may be some truth in this,
although – again – we tend to run up against hard limits. If fuel is so expensive, for example, it is
unlikely there will be much of a surplus.
(It’s also possible that the real reason
for the blaster is not for the pilot to shoot stowaways, but for him to shoot himself if something goes seriously
wrong and he’s condemned to die in interstellar space.) There’s also the blinkered mindset, as I
noted above, that comes from thinking inside the box – you might know the dangers, but there’s no
guarantee that someone from outside will also
know. It’s quite easy to fall into
the trap of assuming that everyone shares your understanding, a trap that can
be extremely dangerous.
It’s also true that a bunch of places I’ve worked had
stupid rules because there was an
answer to ‘who
would be stupid enough to do [whatever]?’
Most of them were quite idiotically stupid; indeed, trying to carry them
out bred contempt for the bureaucrats who wrote them, rather than
alertness. Indeed, in this case, Barton
might have skimped on checking the EDS because he assumed that no one would try
to steal something he couldn’t actually do
anything with. (Ironically, a rule
that the EDS had to be checked and then locked would be very far from ‘stupid’
in hindsight.) But those rules did not
exist until someone broke the laws of common sense and forced the bosses to
write the rules.
These days, all too many people ask – when confronted
with a catastrophe – who can be
blamed? Who can be sued? And The
Cold Equations continues to resonate because of it, with one faction using
the story as an example of someone who did something stupid and therefore
condemned herself to death and the other pointing out that Barton and his
superiors were negligent and therefore could rightfully be punished (i.e. sued)
for Marilyn’s death. I find myself
caught between the two viewpoints – both sides have a point – and there is no
good answer. Barton should have checked the ship, it really should have been locked … but Marilyn was also in an environment
she didn’t understand, while being more than old enough to ask why rules and regulations exist. There are limits to just how many precautions
we can take to deflect stupidity and/or ignorance. At some point, we must ask why the zoo – for
example – is to be blamed for the idiot who climbed two fences to get into the
tiger pit and promptly got eaten. At
some point, we must acknowledge that the zoo took all reasonable precautions
and cannot be blamed for the person who didn’t stop to ask why the fence was
there before they started to climb it.
The blunt truth is two-fold. First, warning signs generally exist for a
reason. Sometimes, they explain the
danger (WARNING: FLOOD). Sometimes, they
don’t. It is simple common sense to be
wary when someone posts a sign, particularly if it’s on a door you have no
business entering. If you don’t know
what the danger is, you should find out before you put your life at risk. (Or, as Niven and Pournelle put it in Oath
of Fealty, which touches on similar themes, you run the risk of
everyone else commenting ‘think of it as evolution in action.’)
Second, there are limits to just how many precautions one
can take against someone who is determined to ignore them. In The
Cold Equations, Marilyn knew she
was doing something wrong. She assumed the worst she’d be facing was a
jail term and willingly chose to ignore a warning sign, accepting that she
might go to jail. But her ignorance sent
her to her death instead. In Oath of Fealty, a politically-connected
teenage boy gets killed in a power plant … after he and his friends ignore a
set of warning signs and break through, IIRC, a locked door. It may be heartless to say that he brought it
on himself – and he’s a lot less
sympathetic than Marilyn – but it’s fundamentally true. Sure, some
warning signs are only there because some barmy bureaucrat thought they
were a good idea. You shouldn’t assume that’s true unless you know how
things actually work.
It’s easy to say, from the comfort of one’s armchair,
that the people involved should have done something different. It’s easy to proclaim that it should be possible to win a war without
taking a single life, for example, but much harder to do it in real life. The people at the sharp end know it’s simply
not possible. Accidents happen. Sometimes, you do everything right – and/or
everything you’re legally required to do – and accidents happen anyway. And when they do, all you can reasonably do
is pick up the pieces, learn from experience and turn the whole affair into a
cautionary tale. Sometimes, there’s no
good choice. You have to take the least
bad option and cope with it as best as possible.
We have a habit of forgetting that, these days. We like to think that perfection is possible
– and, when we don’t get it, we waste time trying to find someone to
blame. Our society is practically
structured to allow us to put off the hard decisions for quite some time, until
they catch up with us and drag us under.
Marilyn made a string of mistakes – as did everyone else – that ended in
tragedy. You cannot cheat the cold
equations. Godwin and Campbell did us a
vast favour by reminding us of that, well before the rot really started to set
in.
And frankly, their story is one that should be read by
everyone.
