Right, and I wasn’t asking about how to save the stowaway. Once it was explained to her, she said plainly, “I can go alone or I can take seven others with me?” That’s what’s so heartrending about it: she didn’t beg. She understood and accepted it.
But when the pilot first found her, she told him, “I intended to pay for my keep on top of paying the fine. I can cook…all kinds of useful things*.” Likewise, if it was customary for EDS pilots to have to wait days, weeks or months for the next cruiser, it was probably also customary for them to roll up their sleeves and join the crew in whatever needed done.
And that brings up another question: What was the pilot’s job on the cruiser before he was sent out on a mission? Or are the pilots like Teamsters: on standby until needed?
*Remember, the colony they were headed for was not the one her brother was in. If she had been able to land safely on Woden, I daresay the crew would have found some useful things for her to do.)
ETA: eris… I know, right? When I see “KEEP OUT” I figure it’s aimed at thieves, not that it’s on the same level as “HIGH VOLTAGE”. Maybe, though, this incident led to greater awareness about the risk of stowing away?
Worse, we’re told that the typical “stowaway” scenario involves a desperate criminal seeking to make an escape and willing to kill anyone who gets in the way, which makes it all the more sensible to do a pre-flight search with some crewmembers around for backup.
My impression, based on lines like “He was an EDS pilot, inured to the sight of death,” is that this is his only job, or at least his primary job. I’m amused by the idea that he’s like a Teamster and flatly refuses to do anything else.
And that “typical” situation happens maybe once in a pilot’s life. Which, coincidentally, is the rate you’d get if they were quite common, and every time it happened it was a coin toss whether the pilot or the stowaway won.
Yeah, but most of the arguments against this story are bullshit.
There isn’t a single Star Wars, Star Trek or Marvel movie that has better internal consistency or less contrivances. If you think the author’s a poor storyteller, fine. If you’d rather try to balance your checkbook and pay your bills than read a story with a no win scenario and a downer ending, fine.
But be honest about why you can’t suspend disbelief. It’s not because the pilot pre-flighted his ship and then took a leak without noticing that the translator who’s been doing language lessons with the crew in the staff lounge isn’t still there.
In many airports I’ve been at, the only obstacle between the “safe” area and climbing into a wheel-well is just a rope barrier. Not even a “no unauthorized personnel” sign. Just an authorized walk out onto the apron, a duck under a rope, and a bit of luck not to get spotted by ground support.
It’s not quite an absolute death sentence like in the story, but it’s at least 75% and probably much higher. Presumably, these people were not suicidal. Either no one told them or they did not figure out that stowing in the wheel-well will probably kill them (and do so in an unpleasant way).
And this is for “civilized” transport, nowhere close to a “frontier” like in the story. Although aircraft do have enough margin that they could reduce their altitude, divert and land if somehow the stowaway were discovered, they do not have so much margin that they can afford to heat and pressurize the wheel-wells, add sensors, maybe a door to the cabin, etc.–just for the sake of the rare-but-not-unheard-of stowaway.
If we take this as our best real-world analogy, the most unrealistic part of the story is that the stowaway was female. In practice, they’re always male.
The author is not at totally fault here. He wrote exactly the stripped down morality tale he wanted. To do so, however, he had to jettison more than merely the girl. As a reader you can understand what he did and judge it on that basis or try to squeeze his elongated circuit diagram into story form and fail.
My position is that for sixty years people have been trying to justify “The Cold Equations” as a story. In the same way they’ve tried to justify Isaac Asimov’s puzzle pieces as competent fiction. You can’t do either. But for some reason Golden Age science fiction clouds men’s minds like the Shadow did.
Well, that sounds like you think he’s a poor storyteller, which is fine, but earlier in the thread it sounded like you were complaining about it’s too contrived, which I think is wrong.
This was written before 9/11, before hijacking to Cuba, when people walked onto planes with zero security.
Hell, my father worked in the basement of the UN for some time, and when I visited him I went through doors marked “Keep Out” right near the vending machines on the lower level of the lobby. No one ever stopped me, no one ever looked twice.
Astounding was full of stories where the hero solved an impossible problem at the last minute. We wouldn’t be talking about this story if it did that. No matter how badly it was written, that we are talking about it over 60 years later (and this isn’t the first thread about it) I think means the story was a success.
Yes, exactly. The “Keep Out” signs meant “Well, it’s actually OK if you come in here, but we’d really rather you didn’t”. Neither you nor anyone else was in any real danger from violating those “Keep Out” signs. And the girl in the story assumed that the signs she walked past were the same way.
Security today is a lot tighter. It wasn’t a matter of the person violating the signs being in danger, it would be anyone in the building if a guy with a gun got in. That wasn’t thought about back then, though.
Anyhow, the security in the story must be designed after Enterprise security, because on the Enterprise any random person can go anywhere and has access to anything. Especially old time dictator supermen like Khan.
