Dropper
Universe Science Fiction – May 1954
(1954)*
Dean A. Grennell
(as by Art Wesley)
Illustrated by Lawrence

Whether the war is fought with spears or space-ships, the time finally comes for the mopping-up, and this has to be done by the Man With A Gun. In the 1900's it was the infantryman and the paratrooper; today it's the Dropper!

-

	"THERE they go!" The Drop-bell had stopped clanging but the echoes were still chasing each other from wall to wall. Pilsudske stood on tiptoes, peering through the tinted quartz of the Drive-room viewpoint at the glinting swarm of capsules fading from sight below.

	Triefuo was a mammoth tennis-ball beneath them, angry-brown and dark green. It swallowed the thousands of glistening motes, seining them in like minnows with its gravity.

	"Rocks, they got!" snorted Mannheim, "Great big rocks that rattle when they nod their heads."

	"It's a job that's not for me," agreed Grafton.

	"What makes a guy get in that screwy outfit in the first place?" Mannheim asked. "There must be easier ways of committing suicide!"

	"I'm damned if I know what makes a man team up with a bunch like that," Pilsudske said, still looking through the window. Half to himself, he added, "Maybe it's a chance to spit through the gates of Hell and stand there and watch it sizzle on the coals. Possibly the Esprit de Corps gets 'em—to work and train and fight beside a gang of mad hellions as daft as yourself. Could be, it's knowing that everyone shakes his head at you when your back is turned and envies you for the guts they ain't got. Or maybe they just want to be heroes."

	"Heroes-pheeroes!" Mannheim snorted derisively. "Medals will be a credit a carload when this thing is over and nobody will give a good-natured damn if you were a dropper or a clerk in some supply depot."

	"You may be right," Pilsudske agreed, "but you mustn't forget that a man who has dropped is a hero to himself."

	"If you're so steamed up on the idea, why don't you put in for Drop School and find out how much fun it is?" asked Mannheim. "Would you like to be making the fall with those boys right now?"

	"Frankly—" Pilsudske took one last look at Triefuo's unsmiling face and turned away. "—No."

	He picked up a geiger from one of the racks and walked away between the drive-piles, squinting thoughtfully at the gauges.

	"You blubber-mouthed fool!" Grafton's whisper seethed with contempt. "You had to jab it in and break it off, didn't you?"

	"What do you mean?" Mannheim asked, honestly puzzled, "What'd I say?"

	"Didn't you know? No, I guess you didn't—Pilsudske chickened out of Drop School—Voluntary GDO. Now do you know what you said?"

	"Well for crissake! I didn't know—nobody ever told me. I just came aboard the last time the Implacable based. You know that!"

	Mannheim started after the tall, stooped figure, busy with geiger and gauges.

	"I'll go apologize."

	Grafton caught his arm.

	"Nope. Forget it. He'd a lot rather you didn't bring it up. He's pretty sensitive about it."

	"I can imagine."

-

	Combat Dropper/3rd Alan MacRaedie swallowed for the ump-ty-umpteenth time and fought down the urge to scream and batter his fists against the shiny plastic walls of his plunging cocoon. When the aneroid trigger let go, and only then, the halves of the shell would pop apart and the parachute would fill. There wasn't any way to open the shell a bit sooner, for a good reason.

	A man dropping in a plastic egg from the belly of a SCPL—that's Space Craft, Personnel Landing—-like roe from a spawning salmon, can wait just about so long and then claustrophobia sets in and he's got to get out.

	Spaceships are too expensive to be exposed to the hazards of ground-fire. Therefore it becomes necessary to make Tactical Drops from several hundred miles above the planet's surface.

	"It takes quite a while before the shell falls far enough into the atmosphere to properly fill the chute. A prematurely-opened canopy would hang limply about the jumper in the vacuum of space and would probably get so thoroughly fouled that it wouldn't open when air was finally reached.

	There is, also, the matter of air to breathe. The shock of the opening parachute may disrupt the flow of oxygen. Treading close on the heels of such a mischance, anoxia—oxygen starvation—would ring down the curtain.

	.Anoxia is a pleasant way to go, but the taxpayers expect every man to do his duty and his duty is not to come down all flaccid and dead.

	The logical solution, then, is to enclose the dropper in a little cartridge of tolerable environment for the trip through airless space. When the outside air gets thick enough, it swells a diaphragm inside the shell and trips the opening device, converting the dropper into a paratrooper.

	Unfortunately a falling parachutist makes a splendid target for the gunner on the ground. Even with a low opening, there must be thousands of droppers so that some will be left to hit dirt intact and come up slugging.

	That's why it is vitally important for the SCPL to have access to reliable information about the barometric pressure in the drop area. Trigger the openings a few thousand feet too high and the ground defense has a field day. Release them a little bit too late and the droppers make a lot of holes in the ground but don't cause much strategic damage.

-

	Back at Prime Base, parsecs to the rear, chop-jowled Marshals fingered rows of multi-colored ribbons, toyed absently with swagger sticks, stood about the big tank in Grand Strategy and decided that Triefuo was a Critical Objective. Their aides, striding officiously back .and forth with aiguillettes swinging, agreed with them.

	Of course.

	Today's history books agree with them too. If the dice of military fortune had fallen differently—if the Kagh fleet had been able to return to Triefuo in time to assist in its defense—then this would be written in Kimshur, if at all.

	There probably wouldn't be much written material if the Kulgonian War had had a different ending. The Kagh are not—or were not—a race of bibliophiles.

	So orders had flashed out over the InstaCom channels, encrypted in the tortuous "Supreme Secret" code. Without exception, they began: "You will proceed to Triefuo/Orrdu V with all possible dispatch. There, you will engage the enemy and subdue him at all costs. Repeat—AT ALL COSTS."

	So the Bomb-Layers had shuttled between the doomed planet and the cargo-ships of the fleet until it became a milk-run and Triefuo was pocked with craters, almost edge-to-edge.

	Then the Bruisers—the Gun Ships, Heavy—formed in Squadrons Echelon and screamed back and forth around the target from pole to pole. Their ventral batteries hammered the smoking ground with kalivite and tulium argate. They did a thorough job.

	Even from beyond the atmosphere, Triefuo was taking on a rather shop-worn look.

	But you can do just so much from above and then the time comes for the Man With A Gun. Somebody has to go down and eliminate the last of the enemy, hunting them from house to house, sniping, digging in, neutralizing an area so the big supply ships can land their loads of ammunition, rations and supplies.

	Enter, then, the Dropper—the hell-for-leather battler, who plummets down to seize a planet with sheer rawhide guts and a Montgomery Radiator, Mark VI.

	Take another look at Alan MacRaedie, Combat Dropper/Third Class, intrepid warrior of Imperial Conquest, with nerves of drawn tungsten and entrails of chrome-molybdenum steel.

	But look closely or you'll think he's a badly frightened youth of nineteen who would rather be a billion other places right now.

	Scared? You bet your sweet bankroll he's scared! Nobody but a psychopathic case could help being scared. Heroes are a bunch of cowards that manage to fool everybody else.

	Sometimes, they even fool themselves.

	Alan's throat felt like dried beer on a marble-topped table. It was a sort of sticky ache and there was an ice-cold muskmelon where his solar plexus should have been. His intestines felt like a goat-skin bag full of brackish water—he could feel them gurgle when he moved. He felt an urgent need for a service the designers hadn't seen fit to provide in the shells.

	He craned his neck for a look at Triefuo, swelling relentlessly below. By the curvature of the horizon, he judged that quite a bit of time remained. His mind went back to the final briefing before they had sealed for the drop.

	Colonel Cramer had been there, tight-lipped, jaw muscles squirming like restless snakes as he stood beside the Captain, who was speaking:

	"... and if any of you men still want to get out, even at this late moment, I want you to come forward and be excused. We want no man making the drop unless he is ready to go through with the action to the end. One craven can bolt and turn the tide of a whole battle. We want that man to bolt right now  ..." 

	Alan remembered the rustle of surprise when Cottrell, big Slim Cottrell, the loudest-talking, hardest-drinking, fiercest-fighting swashbuckler in the platoon had drifted silently out the door with the back of his neck burning brick-red. Of all the men in the bunch, Cottrell would have been picked last for such an act but, when the chips are down, you never can tell . . .

	MacRaedie had wanted to follow Cottrell, had wanted to with all his soul. He'd sent a nervous impulse to his arm, commanding it to raise and offer his resignation. But the fool arm had just twitched ever so slightly and refused to move.

	Maybe it was the lop-sided grins on the faces of the other men as they watched Cottrell make his exit. It may have been the Colonel's expression as his eyes roamed over the remaining men, seeming to linger a moment on each face and probe deep, into the soul behind it.

	Whatever it was, MacRaedie had stuck it out and here he was, enmeshed in the clutch of Triefuo's gravity. And the choice was no longer his to make. There is no drive on a Drop-capsule.

	And his throat still felt dry and sticky and raspy.

	He swallowed again.

-

	Far above and away, two men sat in the Strategic Meteorology room of the Implacable. Their eyes were glued to the' dial of a telemetering barometer whose sensing mechanism was a thousand-odd miles below, at the point-of-drop on Triefuo.

	"That seems like a hell of a lot of air-pressure for Triefuo." Rorrsbach ran nervous fingers through his tousled mop of taffy-colored hair. "I still say it shouldn't be that high!

	"You want me to check with Fleet Stat for the range of pressures?" Kabaldt stubbed out his cigarette, barely-lit, and turned to the intercom.

	"Do that, will you please?"

	Kabaldt hunched over the voca-type and wormed a call through to the Statistics Section aboard the Flagship. A few seconds later, the mechanism whirred, thumped rapidly and issued a yellow message sheet. Kabaldt planked it down on the table between them and choked.

	"Bert, you're right! The pressure gradient is given as 27.65 to 29. 15 inches. That meter's off—'way off!"

	Rorrsbach looked at the page where Kabaldt's finger pointed.

	"Cripes, it can't be! I checked it over myself before we launched it!" He looked back to the dial of the telemeter, stoutly averring that the pressure at landing-point was 29.65 inches of mercury.

	"There's only one way it figures, Pete." He swarmed to his feet and headed for the intercom. "The Kagh must have found that barometer and jimmied it up, somehow."

	He keyed a button, frantically, fumbling over the code signal for "Command Bridge, Top Urgent."

	"Bridge, here."

	"Captain, there's something fritzed up with the telemetering barometer. I'm afraid we got a false reading. That means that the droppers will still be riding sealed when they hit. The triggers are set for 29.58 merc-inches and the highest reading on the books is 29.15. The whole goddam' fleet set their aneroids on the data from that 'meter and the whole blamed drop is gonna dig dirt when they hit!"

	The speaker was silent for a horror-stricken moment and then said "Stand by." and became silent.

	Rorrsbauh looked at Kabaldt and shrugged, sickly.

-

	The Captain looked at the Executive Officer.

	The Exec looked at the Captain

	They both looked at the pickup screen of the electron-telescope where they could see the shells beginning to tumble gently as their vanes caught the first faint scattering of air.

	"How in Hell," moaned the Exec, "are we going to get them out,—Sir?"

	"God only knows." said the Captain, "And I wish to hell He'd tell me!" Somehow, it didn't sound irreverent at the time.

	Then the Quartermaster, a rating named Sanderson, made the suggestion that was to earn him the Galactic Cross.

	"They got Montgomerys." he said, "Why can't they shoot their way out?"

	"By all that's holy," cried the Captain, "you've hit it, man!"

	He grabbed the mike for the Command Channel and began barking into it, words tumbling out of his mouth like the capsules had tumbled from the Drop-bays a scant half-hour before.

	MacRaedie wriggled in the tight confines of the capsule. He was cramped and his legs were going to sleep, despite the null-gravity of free-fall. He forced his legs to relax and tried to work a little circulation back into them.

	There was hardly more space in the shell than in a moderately roomy coffin. He tried to put that thought out of his head. Fine thing to be thinking about at a time like this!

	He thought of Lina—light-years away, but as close as the inside of his head. She was still going to school, but she'd spoken of joining the Auxiliaries in her last letter. Alan wished he could get at his wallet to take another look at her picture. But he could close his eyes and see her the way she had looked the night before the recruit ship had left the blue-and-green agate ball of Terra dwindling below.

	"You're coming back, Al." She had said it fiercely. "I know you're coming back. And some day we'll look back to this night and laugh, together. Come back for me, Alan!"

	And she had kissed him—all their kisses from the time they'd first met, distilled into one short embrace.

	Then she had turned away and walked up the path to the Dormitory. Slim, erect, not too fast, with the black moon-shadow of the trees flickering over her. True to her promise, she hadn't looked back. Alan had watched the door after it had closed behind her ... watched it for a long moment, and then he'd settled the visor of his new uniform cap over his right eye and headed for the bus stop. He hadn't looked back either.

	Somehow, it had seemed better that way.

	He could remember the ride into town with his father—how they had both sat, trying to think of something to say, and how the few starts at talk had petered off into more silence. Then they had landed near the Recruiting Station and his father had looked into his eyes for a few seconds as they shook hands, turned and climbed back into the hauler and chugged off without a backward glance.

	"We're a great bunch for not looking back, I guess." Alan twisted about for another look at Triefuo, now a huge disc below. "Shouldn't be long, now."

	The speaker above his head startled him half out of his wits with its sudden intrusion on his thoughts.

	"Attention, all Droppers! Most Urgent! Your triggers are improperly set. You must release yourselves. Keep calm, follow instructions carefully and everything will be all right. Draw your Montgomery and set it for 36.9 ambecs." When you get the signal, fire carefully to rupture the diaphragm on the aneroid over your head. Don't fire until you get the signal or you'll be a sitting duck for ground-fire! Your Drop Leaders will give the signal. Stand By ..."

	Terror grabbed deep into MacRaedie's chest. He held his right elbow in, close to his ribs, and reached down to undo the flap of his holster. The catch seemed to be stuck—

	He fumbled with it in a frenzy, expecting to hear the command to fire at any instant. He barked his knuckles on the metal of the oxygen regulator but he felt no pain. At last, he got the catch unfastened and his fingers settled over the cool checkering of the Montgomery's grip.

	He yanked it out of the holster—seconds were precious now!

	As the muzzle cleared the top of the holster, he crashed his elbow against the steel oxygen tank. His arm went dead and tingling to the shoulder.

	And the Montgomery—the only thing in the universe that could get him out of the plastic shroud that whizzed him towards Triefuo and a spattery end—dropped slowly -down past his knees, impelled just a little faster than the dropping speed of the shell.

	He made a scrabbling grab for it and only managed to smack his forehead on the hard crystal of the capsule wall.

	He tried to scoop the gun back up with a toe, but he couldn't get it past the ledge at knee-level where the designers had put a storage-space for rations and spare ammo.

	He tried to grasp it between his feet, but the calf-length boots with their thick soles were too clumsy and he couldn't bend his knees far enough.

	He tried to stoop, bending at all his joints, attempting 'to reach the elusive thing with tips of his fingers, but the harness of the chute held him up.

	And he couldn't get at the release of the harness. If he had, he couldn't have gotten it back on in time to hold him when the shell opened up.

	He tried—amazed that he still had a little time—to flip the cursed thing up with his toe . . . again and again. That damned ammo cupboard!

	"Droppers, hear this! This is Colonel Cramer. Make ready to open shells. Take careful aim at the rim of the diaphragm. Mind you don't nick the chute! You will fire at the count of one. Ready ... five ..."

	One last flip with the toe.

	No luck.

	"... four ..."

	"Come back for me, Alan!"

	"Take care of yourself, Son!"

	"... three ..."

	He could see the brass disc of the aneroid about three feet above his head, a tube led in to it, admitting outside air to work against the delicate springs and levers of the triggering mechanism. It couldn't need much more pressure than it already had—something to toss at it—and quick! Quick!! QUICK!!!

	He fumbled through the chest-pockets of his tunic like a madman. Whistle? No. No time to undo the chain

	"... two ..."

	Cigarette case? No—too light and clumsy. Ah, spare charge for the Montgomery . . . heavy, compact—get the hand up—pretend you're shooting marbles—easy now . . . !

	"... ONE ... RELEASE!"

	Steady, boy, your life is riding on this shot—NOW!

	It's going to miss! Oh Christ—it can't!

	It's hitting the chute post ... 

	It's bouncing ... it might ... might ...

	It's hitting! It HIT! 

	WHAM!!

	Sensation of leaping astride a horse's back from the top of a windmill ... of splitting half-way to the neck.

	And the scream of air—outside air—whistling past his ears, the unfamiliar smell of the air of Triefuo.

	Oh, you beautiful, beautiful bumbershoot! The rest of the gang were a few hundred feet above.

	He'd be the first one down.

	And no Montgomery. Before anything else, he'd' have to lift a spare weapon off of some luckless devil who didn't land in one piece.

	There wasn't a bit of doubt in his mind, now, that he'd be needing a gun himself. He knew that Lina had been right, that he'd see her again, someday.

	Bring on those damned Kagh—here comes Lucky MacRaedie! 

The End