The phrase "The Cold Equations" refers to the calculatons that determine Marilyn's fate.

All Marilyn wants is to see her brother, whom she hasn't seen in ten years. She decides, without doing her homework, to sneak onto a cargo ship bound for the frontier planet Woden, where her brother lives. What Marilyn doesn't know, thanks to her lack of research, is that interstellar law states that all stowaways will be thrown overboard because there isn't enough fuel to accommodate any extra weight. Marilyn is acting under the mistaken impression that if caught, she will merely have to pay a fine.

Unfortunately, the "fine" she will pay is her life. This is due to the cold, clinical equations which calculate the amount of fuel required to reach Woden and the corresponding carrying capacity of the vessel upon which she has illegally boarded.

A distinction must be made between the "cold" nature of the decision making that leads to Marilyn's death and cruelty. The action of jettisoning Marilyn, while harsh, ensures the safe passage of the other passengers on board. It it easy to see the authorities point of view, that keeping her on board and making an exception to the well-established laws would jeopardize the lives of everybody else aboard.

In a nutshell, the "cold equations" referred to in the title of this fascinating short story are the numbers that must be crunched to determine the necessity of jettisoning Marilyn and sending her to certain death.

The classic science fiction short story "The Cold Equations" tells of a pilot named Barton aboard an EDS, or Emergency Dispatch Ship, who is tasked with delivering a supply of medicine to a colony on a frontier planet. After leaving the immense hyperspace cruiser and beginning his descent, Barton realizes that there is a stowaway aboard. The rules say that any stowaway that is discovered must be immediately ejected into space, as the EDS has no weight allowance for extra passengers. However, Barton discovers that it's an eighteen-year-old girl who just wanted to go down onto the planet to visit her brother. He contacts his superiors and does everything he can to avoid killing the girl, but in the end, he has no choice and must put her into the airlock and eject her into space.

The title "The Cold Equations" refers to the calculations involved in determining how much fuel the EDS needs to safely make it down to the planet with its cargo. The word "equations" refers to the calculations, and the word "cold" refers to the fact that they are relentless, unchangeable, and capable of resulting in the death of those who do not respect them. The details of the story that refer to this are found near the beginning when Barton, the pilot, is considering what he is going to have to do and why.

The cruisers were forced by necessity to carry a limited amount of bulky rocket fuel, and the fuel was rationed with care, the cruiser's computers determining the exact amount of fuel each EDS would require for its mission. The computers considered the course coordinates, the mass of the EDS, the mass of pilot and cargo; they were very precise and accurate and omitted nothing from their calculations. They could not, however, foresee and allow for the added mass of a stowaway

Godwin refers to these equations later in the story while Barton is attempting to delay carrying out the execution as long as possible.

H amount of fuel will not power an EDS with a mass of M plus X safely to its destination. To him and her brother and parents she was a sweet-faced girl in her teens; to the laws of nature she was X, an unwanted factor in a cold equation.

Tom Godwin's chosen title for his short story "The Cold Equations" refers to the cold, factual mathematical equations that were used to calculate Marilyn's fate.

The first equation refers to the one the computers that govern the Stardust cruiser and the Emergency Dispatch Ships (EDS) use to calculate how much fuel to load Barton's EDS with so that he will safely arrive on Wodoen to fulfill his emergency mission. The conflict of the story is built around the fact that the computers only calculate the amount of fuel required to transport the ship, Barton, and his cargo, no outside factors such as a stowaway. Therefore, the longevity of Marilyn's life is governed by the simple calculation that says there is not enough fuel to carry her weight plus land the ship safely on Woden so Barton can save the lives several explorers. The first cold, hard equation is referred to in the following sentences just after the narrator of the story reflects on the fact that the men conquering the frontier, meaning outer space, perfectly understand they are at the mercy of natural forces, such as tornadoes, which feel "neither hatred nor compassion" for living beings:

The men of the frontier knew--but how was a girl from Earth to fully understand? h amount of fuel will not power an EDS with a mass of m plus x safely to its destination. To him and her brother and parents she was a sweet-faced girl in her teens; to the laws of nature she was x, the unwanted factor in a cold equation.

The second equation is the one Barton uses to determine that if he reduces his deceleration to .10 at a specific moment in time he can afford to keep Marilyn on-board for a certain amount of time without crashing because his fuel has run out. Commander Delhart agrees to ask the computer how long she can remain on-board at that speed, and the computer returns with the answer that she can remain on-board until 19:10, exactly 57 minutes.

What are the cold equations referred to in Tom Godwin's short story "The Cold Equations"?

There are two "cold" equations used and referred to in Tom Godwin's short story "The Cold Equations." The first is the equation used to calculate the exact amount of fuel needed for an Emergency Dispatch Ship (EDS) to reach its destination; the second is the equation used to determine how long Marilyn can safely stay on-board the EDS at a decreased deceleration speed. Both equations are governed by the laws of nature, and these laws determine the longevity of Marilyn's life, just as they determine the longevity of the lives of all men on the frontier, meaning the men who are colonizing outer space:

The men of the frontier knew—but how was a girl from Earth to fully understand? h amount of fuel will not power an EDS with a mass of m plus x safely to its destination. To him and her brother and parents she was a sweet-faced girl in her teens; to the laws of nature she was x, the unwanted factor in a cold equation.

The first equation is the one computers use to determine the precise amount of fuel needed for an EDS to reach its destination in order to fulfill its emergency rescue mission. Since EDSs must be fast and, therefore, lightweight, they can only carry a limited amount of fuel. Fuel is calculated based on mass and distance. The amount of time and energy it takes to reduce the ship's deceleration speed must also be factored because EDSs have to be traveling very slowly to be able to enter the atmosphere of the new planet without burning up. Deceleration requires a great deal of energy, which consumes fuel faster; the girl's additional weight would increase the "gravities of deceleration" to the extent that the ship would run out of fuel before reaching its destination.

The second equation is the one the computers use, upon Barton's request, to calculate how long Marilyn can safely stay on-board the ship traveling at a reduced deceleration speed of .10 gravities. Commander Delhart agrees to feed the data of Marilyn's weight, the speed of deceleration, and distance into the computers in order to keep Marilyn on-board and alive as long as possible and returns with the answer that Barton can remain at the deceleration speed of .10 gravity until 19:10, exactly 57 minutes.

What metaphors are found in Tom Godwin's short story "The Cold Equations"?

This may be a story about the future, but the sexual politics are definitely from the 50's, when this story was published. The story's central point is that the laws of nature are immutable and supersede human emotional needs. The fact that the stowaway is a girl invokes an emotional response in the pilot that, had the stowaway been a man, would not have happened. So in a sense, the "cold equation" that sentences the girl to death can be seen as a metaphor for "natural laws" that are deployed to emphasize the girl's powerlessness and the scientific "authority" of the men.

Another kind of metaphor might be the description of Marilyn's body after being jettisoned into space: she will go from being a "pretty girl" to a corpse "all dry and shapeless and horribly ugly." Her body can be understood as a metaphor for her humanity, although again in this case her personality is either subsumed by her physicality, or infantilized (as with he story of her brother getting her a kitten).

In both cases, the girl's only defense against the rule that says she must be jettisoned is her being a girl. While it may be true that her added weight has thrown off the fuel calculations for the ship, it also is true that these calculations mandate a kind ritual violence exempt from moral law.

What metaphors are found in Tom Godwin's short story "The Cold Equations"?

In his short story "The Cold Equations," author Tom Godwin uses personification and similes much more often than he uses metaphors. Still, a few metaphors can be found. A metaphor is a type of figurative language in which an author creates additional meaning by comparing two unrelated things by saying something is something else. Through metaphors, authors give further meaning to abstract concepts by relating abstract concepts to concrete objects, allowing the reader to picture the abstract concept in his or her mind. Metaphors can be implied as well as explicitly stated.

Godwin uses two metaphors in Marilyn's final remarks to her brother in their goodbye conversation over the communicator. In these final remarks, Marilyn tells her brother she'll always be with him in some form or another, even in her death. The idea that Marilyn will always be with him gives both of them more courage to face their losses. Marilyn first uses a metaphor to describe herself as the breeze that surrounds a person, thereby comparing herself to a breeze, saying "maybe I'll be the touch of a breeze that whispers to you as it goes by."

Since Marilyn is saying she will be a breeze in the future, even though she can never literally be a breeze, even in her death, she is creating an implied comparison by calling herself a breeze in some future point in time.

She next creates an implied metaphor to say she'll always be near him in the form of a lark. She says, "maybe I'll be one of those gold-winged larks you told me about, singing my silly head off to you."

Even in her death, Marilyn cannot literally be breeze or a lark, we know she is creating metaphors by saying she will be those things in the future.

Earlier, a simpler, explicitly stated metaphor is used to describe Barton's and Marilyn's view of the planet Woden aboard the EDS as they approach it:

Woden was a ball.

Planets are never literally balls. Even the planet Earth is not perfectly spherical. It is, instead, what scientists today call "not even a perfect oblate spheroid" (Choi, C., "Strange but True: Earth Is Not Round," Scientific American).

What are the main events in the first paragraph of Tom Godwin's short story "The Cold Equations"?

The very first paragraph of Tom Godwin's short story titled "The Cold Equations" is actually nothing more than one very suspenseful sentence, stating, "He was not alone." However, there is a more standard full paragraph after the opening sentence that contains a few events though not many.

The first event is that the narrator describes the hand of the heat gauge in the control panel in front of the protagonist as having moved up a tiny bit. The gauge had read zero when the ship launched, but over time has moved up a tiny bit. It has been an hour since launch time, so it has taken an hour for the gauge to register a tiny bit of heat beyond the heat that should be being emitted from the protagonist.

We can say that a second event described in the paragraph is the protagonist listening to his environment for the sounds of an intruder since he knows the heat gauge is telling him some being is inside the ship besides himself, but all the protagonist hears is the "murmur of the drives." We can also say that a third event is that the protagonist realizes the heat gauge is pointing towards the closet containing the emergency supplies; the hand of the gauge tells him a body, or being, is inside the closet.

However, it should also be noted that all three of these events happen simultaneously: the protagonist notices the hand of the gauge, listens to his environment, and comprehends what the gauge is signifying all at the same time.