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The story stood out long after its publication and was considered one of the best science fiction short stories published before The pilot of an Emergency Dispatch Ship EDS launched from a larger ship, the Stardust, is on his way to deliver a curative serum to six ailing men on the planet Woden, whose own supply of serum was destroyed by a tornado.
When the pilot realizes that he has a stowaway, he judges that he will have to jettison the transgressor into space. However, the pilot is shocked to discover that the stowaway is a girl named Marilyn Cross. Although Marilyn sees the warning sign prohibiting the entry of unauthorized personnel to the EDS, she is unaware of the deathly consequences of breaking the rules, thinking that she will only have to pay a fine if she is caught.
Otherwise, she would have to wait the year it would take him to arrive on Mimir, where she has a job waiting for her. The Commander tells him in no uncertain terms that the stowaway must be jettisoned according to regulations.
Marilyn is horrified when she learns that she must be jettisoned. The pilot apologizes profusely, although nothing that she says or does will change his mind. Both the pilot and Marilyn wonder how long she can stay on the ship without her weight becoming a liability. The pilot uses a computer to calculate that she has about an hour to live.
The remorseful pilot explains to Marilyn that life on the space frontier is subject to more exacting laws than those of Earth. Marilyn asks to write to her parents and to speak to Gerry via the communicator. The pilot agrees and offers her a pencil and paper. He imagines how her parents will hate and blame him. Moreover, he believes he will see her in his nightmares after her death.
Having accepted the inevitability of her imminent death, Marilyn regrets not telling her parents and Gerry how much she loved and appreciated them. She tells the pilot about an incident in which Gerry secretly replaced a kitten who got run over, allowing Marilyn to maintain the illusion that her pet still lived. And the ship probably could have detected the weight discrepancy at launch if it had any kind of decent equipment. Godwin does a good job of closing off most of the options.
Even so, the options are not zero. But before they resort to that, air has mass, and the ship seems to be big enough that they might be able to vent enough of the air to lighten the ship while still leaving them enough to carry out the landing.
But no, all that can be chalked up to sloppy writing. Actually, there was probably a margin in the trajectory all along. In fact, there are often low-energy trajectories that will reduce the fuel requirements a lot—for some paths , to almost zero! But they can take weeks or even months. None of these things get at the root of the problem.
The real problem with this story is that the rocket equation does not work that way! This is the rocket equation, discovered by Russian physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Although British mathematician William Moore also figured it out a century earlier.
This is the equation that ends so tragically for Marilyn. This is an exponential function. Again, you need more fuel to lift the fuel, and so on, so even if you only need to go a little bit faster by rocket standards , you need a lot more fuel. How much delta- v would the ship lose from that one percent shortfall in fuel? Maybe just turn the engines off, and save some fuel for the landing.
The equations are never going to be precise to the last gram there, so the ship needs to be built to handle a rougher reentry. Problem solved. So, there are two possible responses to this. Although even then, some other option like a water landing or even a different landing site given the rotation of the planet might be possible. Second, since Godwin or rather Campbell was trying to close off all solutions, what if the ship was not going to a planet, but to a space station?
Then, there would be no atmosphere to slow it down, and yes, the equations would work the way he wanted…but really? Would a space station really not have some kind of shuttle that could make the mile-per-hour round trip to go and intercept the ship and bring it in?
The fuel requirement would be a pittance—five hundred pounds kg with a generous safety margin, only a few percent the mass of the ship. So, yes, you could technically make it work, but the story would have to be twice as contrived as it already is. The equations were wrong. You are commenting using your WordPress.
You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. My blog of science, science fiction, and more. The header image is a rendering of a possible future skyhook-space station. Email Address:. Science Meets Fiction. Skip to content. I think Godwin and Campbell got the equations themselves wrong. If you turn the rocket equation around, you get this.
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