During the inspiral and merger of black holes, the interaction of
gravitational wave multipoles carries linear momentum away, thereby providing
an astrophysically important recoil, or "kick" to the system and to the final
black hole remnant. It has been found that linear momentum during the last
stage (quasinormal ringing) of the collapse tends to provide an "antikick" that
in some cases cancels almost all the kick from the earlier (quasicircular
inspiral) emission. We show here that this cancellation is not due to
peculiarities of gravitational waves, black holes, or interacting multipoles,
but simply to the fact that the rotating flux of momentum changes its intensity
slowly. We show furthermore that an understanding of the systematics of the
emission allows good estimates of the net kick for numerical simulations
started at fairly late times, and is useful for understanding qualitatively
what kinds of systems provide large and small net kicks.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, 2 table
