“I don’t see how you guys can go along with this business about them deciding what to say,” said Philips. “Can’t you tell already what their game is?”
“Yes, absolutely,” said Saxon. “But think about this: How would anybody in that group know what we’re sending anyway?”
Halloran grinned. “Jantzen was afraid this was all a big hoax anyway. We wouldn’t want to disappoint him!”
“Actually, I don’t intend for it to be a hoax,” said Saxon. “With four and a half years between a transmission and an answer, we’re going to have an awful lot of time to transmit. So what if we take twenty minutes now and then for a paid political announcement, which technically is all we’d have to do. Then we have most of the rest of the time for real work.”
“Besides, it’s Arecibo sending the messages. Duran doesn’t have to transmit anything he doesn’t want to,” said Halloran.
Saxon smiled. “I’ve worked with Duran for a long time now. He’s agreed to use English as our Earth-to-alien language in return for access to our supercomputer decoding capability. He is, in effect, a member of our subcommittee, except he doesn’t have to put up with Jantzen!”