"That's because of our Stealth design," Androv said. "We have almost no radar signature. Not only are we a menace to the world, we're invisible."
Vance floated down and settled into the central G-seat. The more he learned about the Daedalus, the more unsettling he found it. What should they do with this monster? Maybe turn it over to the UN as a monument to technology gone amuck, to high-tech excess. At last, he thought, man has achieved the ability to move anywhere on the planet, at speeds as fast as the laws of physics will allow, and do it invisibly. Maybe it should be called the Shadow.
"Okay." Eva interrupted his thoughts. "I've finished tying in the Zenith. We're about to go live from the top, gentlemen, the very top. I'm going to send the protocol to every wire service in the world. What better credibility than to be downlinked live from space?"
Vance looked at the picture from the nose camera. They were over the Atlantic now, which meant they'd soon be passing over the Soviet Union, with line-of-sight horizons that stretched from Europe to Asia.
"Why settle for print?" He had a sudden thought. "How about television? With all this video gear, we should be able to put together something that would transmit. The Baikonur Cosmodrome has receiving facilities. We see Soviet cosmonauts in space all the time. And they'll be directly under us. We also could make the evening news all over Japan if we broadcast to the Katsura tracking facility."
"Good thinking, but I've got an even better idea." She seemed to pirouette in weightlessness. "Japan already has DBS, direct broadcast satellites, and there are home satellite dishes all over the country. It's the Global Village. So why don't we just cut in for a special bulletin?"
"Why not." He pointed to the ill-fated cockpit camera Tanzan Mino's technicians had installed above the entry hatch. "Matter of fact, we probably could just use that, if we could hook it into some of the electronics here on the console."
He floated up, half drifting and half swimming, and inspected the camera, convincing himself that it was still in working condition. And it had to be wired into something. Maybe now all they needed to do was flip the right toggles. The console switches numbered, by his conservative estimate, approximately three hundred.
"Let me see what I can do." Androv floated down and immediately started to work, toggling, testing, watching the display screens as various messages were scrolled.
"Petra," he finally commanded in Russian, "give me a positive connect between UHF display-read and video output terminal 3-K."