Collision And Resonance

The Stars Are Also Fire, 20.

Edmond Beynac and others explore an asteroid composed of metals that were once fused and therefore were part of a body large enough to melt and form a core. The flat surface on one side is the fracture line where a collision broke this particular asteroid loose from the larger body. The evidence suggests not that the collision shattered that original body but only that several large fragments like the present asteroid were broken from it. The original body, if still in the Solar System, should now be in an eccentric orbit. Beynac's son, Temerir, a Lunarian astronomer, will:

"...search after the great planetoid Father dreamed of..." (p. 275)

This sub-plot has legs.

Beynac's death motivates his sons to:

"'...break the ban of the overlords and set Luna free in space." (p. 273)

Their mother, Dagny, agrees to help politically, another reason to call her "the Mother of the Moon."

Beynac's death:

"What caused the disaster was a shaped minicharge. It should simply have split an anomalous plumbic vein, to produce recoverable specimens. Instead the explosion found a resonance. Weaknesses unstressed for billions of years gave way... A dozen huge, a hundred lesser chunks fell." (p. 270)

Beynac's helmet is smashed open.

That resonance rang a bell:

"'An incipient causal loop is always dangerous, you know. It can set up a resonance, and the changes of history that that produces can multiply catastrophically.'"

-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 333-465 AT 1935, p. 449.

 

A material resonance shatters an overhang on an asteroidal peak whereas a temporal resonance causes multiple historical changes.