Too, very little could be anticipated about the gravities of the task. The planet’s revolution produced, as usual, a sizable magnetic field. Amalfi did not know how well that field would take to being tipped with relation to the space-lattice which it distorted, nor just what would happen when the spindizzies polarized the whole gravity field. During “moving day” the planet would be, in effect, without magnetic moment of its own, and since the Calculator was one of the City Fathers, there was no way of finding out where the energy would reappear, in what form, or in what intensity.
He broached the latter question to Hazleton. “If we were dealing with an ordinary case, I’d say it would show up as velocity,” he pointed out. “In which case we’d be in for an involuntary junket. But this is no ordinary case. The mass involved is . . . well, it’s planetary, that’s all. What do you think, Mark?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Hazleton admitted. “When we move the city, we change the magnetic moment of its component atoms; but the city itself doesn’t revolve, and doesn’t have a gross magnetic moment. Still—we could control velocity; suppose the energy reappears as heat, instead? There’d be nothing left but a cloud of gas.”
Amalfi shook his head. “That’s a bogey. The gyroscopic resistance may show up as heat, sure, but not the magnetogravitic. I think we’d be safe to expect it to appear as velocity, just as in ordinary spindizzy operation. Figure the conversation equivalency and tell me what you get.”