In Tom Godwin’s story, “The Cold Equations,” he speaks about the ongoing battle of moral obligations versus legal obligations, and how legal obligations will overcome in the end, even if you know it’s not the right thing to do. In this story, the main character is a pilot of a ship carrying a medical vaccine to a place called Woden, and while he is on this route, he discovers a stowaway on his ship. Now, the type of ships these pilots fly are only given barely enough fuel to get to their destinations, and only handle the amount of weight that won’t drain the fuel. When the pilot discovers this stowaway, he knew exactly what he had to do; he needed to eject the stowaway out of the airlock into space as soon as he could. When he confronts the stowaway however, it wasn’t a male like they usually were, it was a girl, named Marilyn Lee Cross.…show more content… The pilot did everything that he could do so that he didn’t have to eject Marilyn, but eventually, he realized he couldn’t do anything more than let her say her last goodbyes. He had her call her brother over the ship’s radio, and write letters to her family and then he had to let her out of the airlock, and she died. One example of the thematic tension is when the pilot finds the girl hidden away, and he doesn’t know what to do with her because the stowaways are usually male and he would just eject them right away. When the author is explaining the moment that the pilot realizes that the stowaway is a girl, he says, “The stowaway was not a man—she was a girl in her teens...Now
