Cold Equation Theme

The short story “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin portrays the theme that sometimes your best isn’t enough. This short story starts out with a stowaway found on a spacecraft by an EDS Pilot, but this stowaway was a teenage girl named Marilyn. All Marilyn wanted was to see her brother on the planet called Mimir, she was willing to pay a fine, do her share of work, anything, but unfortunately, according to the laws of nature and man, she had to leave the ship or else the ship would crash. Or in other words, she would die. Within the last few minutes of her life, she gets to talk to her brother on Mimir and tell him goodbye. As she steps into the airlock, she prepares herself for what was about to happen. After she is killed by the soul sucking,

pitch black vacuum of space, the EDS Pilot, also known as the narrator, was left in an empty room with her words echoing around in his head,”I didn’t do anything to die for---I didn’t do anything--” The theme that sometimes your best isn’t enough is shown in this short story when the narrator was talking to Marilyn. At the beginning of the story when Marilyn was just recently discovered, her and the narrator are talking about why she was there and how she got aboard. Marilyn says,”I intended to pay for my keep on top of paying the fine. I can cook and I can patch clothes for everyone and I know how to do all kinds of useful things, even a little bit about nursing”(3). At the time paying money, cooking, patching clothes, and nursing was all Marilyn could do from her position. Yet it still wasn’t enough to save her life. That's why this is such a good example of why sometimes your best isn’t enough. Another example of this theme is when the Captain is talking to the narrator. Close to the middle of the story, the narrator and the captain are talking about what could be done to stop the unfortunate future for the once bright teenager. The captain says, “I’m sorry---I can do nothing. This cruiser must maintain its schedule; the life of not one person but the lives of many depend on it. I know how you feel but I’m powerless to help you”(4). Each ship is only loaded with the exact amount of fuel that it would need to get to its destination. If you have more weight on a ship than expected, the ship runs out of fuel faster than it should, causing the ship to wreck. That is why they could not keep Marilyn on the ship because if she were to stay, the ship would never get to Mimir to save those lives that depended on them. The captain's best was not enough to save her life. One last piece of evidence to back up the theme that sometimes your best isn’t enough is a statement that the EDS Pilot says to Marilyn about half way through the story. He says, “There are no other cruisers within forty light-years; there is nothing and no one to change things”(5). After the narrator contacted the captain in hopes that he could do something, he fell to the realization that he could do nothing more for Marilyn. There was not another ship anywhere close to them to help them out, and again, the narrator's best was not enough to save Marilyn's life. To conclude, the short story “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin demonstrates the theme that sometimes your best isn’t enough.