"Go ahead, say it your way. Use my voice and my authority as Minister of Defense and acting head of government. Do it, Mike, throw rocks at 'em! Damn it, big rocks! Hit 'em hard!"

"Righto, Man!"

25

"A maximum of instructive shrecklichkeit with minimum loss of life. None, if possible"--was how Prof summed up doctrine for Operation Hard Rock and was way Mike and I carried it out. Idea was to hit earthworms so hard would convince them--while hitting so gently as not to hurt. Sounds impossible, but wait.

Would necessarily be a delay while rocks fell from Luna to Terra; could be as little as around ten hours to as long as we dared to make it. Departure speed from a catapult is highly critical and a variation on order of one percent could double or halve trajectory time, Luna to Terra. This Mike could do with extreme accuracy--was equally at home with a slow ball, many sorts of curves, or burn it right over plate--and I wish he had pitched for Yankees. But no matter how he threw them, final velocity at Terra would be close to Terra's escape speed, near enough eleven kilometers per second as to make no difference. That terrible speed results from gravity well shaped by Terra's mass, eighty times that of Luna, and made no real difference whether Mike pushed a missile gently over well curb or flipped it briskly. Was not muscle that counted but great depth of that well.

So Mike could program rock-throwing to suit time needed for propaganda. He and Prof had settled on three days plus not more than one apparent rotation of Terra--24hrs-50min-28.32sec--to allow our first target to reach initial point of program. You see, while Mike was capable of hooking a missile around Terra and hitting a target on its far side, he could be much more accurate if he could see his target, follow it down by radar during last minutes and nudge it a little for pinpoint accuracy.

We needed this extreme accuracy to achieve maximum frightfulness with minimum-to-zero killing. Call our shots, tell them exactly where they would be hit and at what second--and give them three days to get off that spot.

So our first message to Terra, at 0200 13 Oct 76 seven hours after they invaded, not only announced destruction of their task force, and denounced invasion for brutality, but also promised retaliation bombing, named times and places, and gave each nation a deadline by which to denounce F.N.'s action, recognize us, and thereby avoid being bombed. Each deadline was twenty-four hours before local "strike".

Was more time than Mike needed. That long before impact a rock for a target would be in space a long way out, its guidance thrustors still unused and plenty of elbow room. With considerably less than a full day's warning Mike could miss Terra entirely--kick that rock sideways and make it fall around Terra in a permanent orbit. But with even an hour's warning he could usually abort into an ocean.

First target was North American Directorate.

All great Peace Force nations, seven veto powers, would be hit: N.A. Directorate, Great China, India, Sovunion, PanAfrica (Chad exempted), Mitteleuropa, Brasilian Union. Minor nations were assigned targets and times, too--but were told that not more than 20 percent of these targets would be hit--partly shortage of steel but also frightfulness: if Belgium was hit first time around, Holland might decide to protect her polders by dealing out before Luna was again high in her sky.

But every target was picked to avoid if possible killing anybody. For Mitteleuropa this was difficult; our targets had to be water or high mountains--Adriatic, North Sea, Baltic, so forth. But on most of Terra is open space despite eleven billion busy breeders.

North America had struck me as horribly crowded, but her billion people are clumped--is still wasteland, mountain and desert. We laid down a grid on North America to show how precisely we could hit--Mike felt that fifty meters would be a large error. We had examined maps and Mike had checked by radar all even intersections, say 105° W by 50° N--if no town there, might wind up on target grid... especially if a town was close enough to provide spectators to be shocked and frightened.

We warned that our bombs would be as destructive as H- bombs but emphasized that there would be no radioactive fallout, no killing radiation--just a terrible explosion, shock wave in air, ground wave of concussion. We warned that these might knock down buildings far outside of explosion and then left it to their judgments how far to run. If they clogged their roads, fleeing from panic rather than real danger--well, that was fine, just fine!

But we emphasized that nobody would get hurt who heeded our warnings, that every target first time around would be uninhabited--we even offered to skip any target if a nation would inform us that our data were out-of-date. (Empty offer; Mike's radar vision was a cosmic 20/20.)

But by not saying what would happen second time around, we hinted that our patience could be exhausted.

In North America, grid was parallels 35, 40, 45, 50 degrees north crossed by meridians 110, 115, 120 west, twelve targets. For each we added a folksy message to natives, such as:

"Target 115 west by 35 north--impact will be displaced forty-five kilometers northwest to exact top of New York Peak. Citizens of Goffs, Cima, Kelso, and Nipton please note.

"Target 100 west by 40 north is north 30° west of Norton, Kansas, at twenty kilometers or thirteen English miles. Residents of Norton, Kansas, and of Beaver City and Wilsonville, Nebraska, are cautioned. Stay away from glass windows. It is best to wait indoors at least thirty minutes after impact because of possibility of long, high splashes of rock. Flash should not be looked at with bare eyes. Impact will be exactly 0300 your local zone time Friday 16 October, or 0900 Greenwich time--good luck!

"Target 110 W by 50 N--impact will be offset ten kilometers north. People of Walsh, Saskatchewan, please note."

Besides this grid, a target was selected in Alaska (150 W x 60 N) and two in Mexico (110W x 30 N, 105 W x 25 N) so that they would not feel left out, and several targets in the crowded east, mostly water, such as Lake Michigan halfway between Chicago and Grand Rapids, and Lake Okeechobee in Florida. Where we used bodies of water Mike worked predictions of flooding waves from impacts, a time for each shoreline establishment.

For three days, starting early morning Tuesday 13th and going on to strike time early Friday 16th, we flooded Earth with warnings. England was cautioned that impact north of Dover Straits opposite London Estuary would cause disturbances far up Thames; Sovunion was given warning for Sea of Azov and had own grid defined; Great China was assigned grid in Siberia, Gobi Desert, and her far west--with offsets to avoid her historic Great Wall noted in loving detail. Pan Africa was awarded shots into Lake Victoria, still-desert part of Sahara, one on Drakensberg in south, one offset twenty kilometers due west of Great Pyramid--and urged to follow Chad not later than midnight Thursday, Greenwich. India was told to watch certain mountain peaks and outside Bombay harbor--time, same as Great China. And so forth.

Attempts were made to jam our messages but we were beaming straight down on several wavelengths--hard to stop.

Warnings were mixed with propaganda, white and black-- news of failed invasion, horror pictures of dead, names and I.D. numbers of invaders--addressed to Red Cross and Crescent but in fact a grim boast showing that every trooper had been killed and that all ships' officers and crew had been killed or captured--we "regretted" being unable to identify dead of flagship, as it had been shot down with destruction so complete as to make it impossible.