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"The Pole with the fleet Either they've found out the buggers aren't a threat after all, or we're about to have a big battle One way or another, the bugger war is about to be over They're getting ready for after the war"

"If they're os"

"It's all internal, within the Warsaw Pact"

This was troubling The facade of peace and cooperation had been undisturbed alan What Peter had detected was a fundamental shift in the world order She had a mental picture, as clear as ers forced peace upon them "So it's back to the way it was before"

"A few changes The shields make it so nobody bothers with nuclear weapons anymore We have to kill each other thousands at a tirinned "Val, it was bound to happen Right now there's a vast international fleet and arer wars are over, all that poill vanish, because it's all built on fear of the buggers And suddenly we'll look around and discover that all the old alliances are gone, dead and gone, except one, the Warsaw Pact And it'll be the dollar against five million lasers We'll have the asteroid belt, but they'll have Earth, and you run out of raisins and celery kind of fast out there, without Earth"

What disturbed Valentine most of all was that Peter did not seeet the idea that you are thinking of this as a golden opportunity for Peter Wiggin?"

"For both of us, Val"

"Peter, you're twelve years old I'e They call us children and they treat us like mice"

"But we don't think like other children, do we, Val? We don't talk like other children And above all, we don't write like other children"

"For a discussion that began with death threats, Peter, we've strayed fro excited Writing was so Val did better than Peter They both knew it Peter had even named it once, when he said that he could always see what other people hated most about themselves, and bully them, while Val could always see what other people liked best about the it, but it was true Valentine could persuade other people to her point of view--she could convince them that they wanted what she wanted them to want Peter, on the other hand, could only make them fear what he wanted them to fear When he first pointed this out to Val, she resented it She had wanted to believe she was good at persuading people because she was right, not because she was clever But no matter how much she told herself that she didn't ever want to exploit people the way Peter did, she enjoyed knowing that she could, in her way, control other people And not just control what they did She could control, in a hat they wanted to do She was ashamed that she took pleasure in this power, and yet she found herself using it soet teachers to do what she wanted, and other students To get Mother and Father to see things her way Sometimes, she was able to persuade even Peter That was theof all--that she could understand Peter well enough, could eet inside him that way There was h sometiht as Peter spoke: You dream of power, Peter, but in my oay I am more powerful than you

"I've been studying history," Peter said "I've been learning things about patterns in hu itself, and at tie the world Think what Pericles did in Athens, and Demosthenes--"

"Yes, they ed to wreck Athens twice"

"Pericles, yes, but Deht about Philip--"

"Or provoked him--"

"See? This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are tiht place can move the world Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance Bismarck Lenin"