The short story “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin demonstrated that messing with universal laws without thinking can lead to a terrible result. The story begins with an EDS pilot who notices something different on his ship. When he figures out it was a girl that stowed away on his ship, he didn’t know what to do. Instead of automatically killing her, he tried to do everything he could to keep her alive, but universal laws made it impossible. When he described the laws and what had to happen to the girl, she understood and asked to talk to her brother who was the reason she got onto the ship. After she finished writing letters to her family, her brother finally came through, and they said their final words to each other. As her brother went out of range, she simply walked over to the airlock where she would be released into space. The story ends with the pilot still feeling her present on the ship as he sees a shapeless and ugly figure flying in front of him.…show more content… After the pilot found out from the Stardust that there was nothing he could do to save the girl, he told her and she responded, "You mean it—you really mean it… You're going to do it—you're going to make me die?”(5). She didn’t understand why she had to die for doing something so little. Later in the story, the pilot explains that because she is from Earth where mistakes don’t really have any major consequences, she does not understand that in space, if a mistake is made, then life would severely pay. She just thought that she would just have to pay a fine, not get
