ell, this was a strange way to find a lost story. Was watching an Anime (it wasn’t that good) and in it, the idea of airlocking someone comes up. One of the characters makes a crack about The Cold Equations. I have to admit I was curious and found it online – it’s a scifi from Tom Godwin, published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1954. And that made me dizzy – think about it. A lost story from before I was born ends up noticed in Japan, where it gets a shout out in an anime, which comes back to me through dubbing. What a strange and wonderful path that was. It’s so weird, it’s like the DrakTalman in Enemy Mine. 

So, yes, the short story. Image that the future frontier is a wide-spread expanding place, the only contact the massive hyperspace cruisers that are always on the move, keeping to critically-tight schedules. For side-trips, they might launch an Emergency Dispatch Ship (or EDS), a tiny flimsy craft with only enough fuel to fly from their drop point and set down on the target planet on fumes (and wait there for later pickup). Everything for this one descent is computer-calculated, totaling the pilot’s weight, ship weight, fuel weight, cargo weight.

And the pilot of our story has just realized he has a stowaway.

So think about this. He cannot take this person to the planet he’s going to – they will run out of fuel on descent and crash. And in this, the rules are quite clear:

Any stowaway discovered in an EDS shall be jettisoned intermediately following discovery.

It tuns out that the stowaway is a young, foolish girl who wished to see her brother, working on the target planet as a researcher. Coming from peaceful, easy-going Earth, she first shrugs it off and agrees to pay any fines for her actions.

But there is no fine. There is only the airlock.

It was really an interesting idea – can she be saved? Is there a way out of this dilemma?

I’m not going to tell you. You’ll have to work on it. Sixteen pages – easy.

The Cold Equations

Enjoy!

>>>AND HERE’S A LINK TO MY OWN NOVELS!<<<