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"I have nothing to establish except the clothing I'"

"You own nothing?"

"They keep my salary in an account somewhere on Earth I've never

needed it Except to buy civilian clothes on my--vacation"

"A non-luttonous ascetic? Such a contradiction"

"When I'm tense, I eat Whereas when you're tense, you spout solid waste"

"I like you, Colonel Graff I think we shall get along"

"I don't ar I came here for Ender And neither of us came here for you"

Ender hated Eros fro He had been uncoh on Earth, where floors were flat; Eros was hopeless It was a roughly spindle-shaped rock only six and a half kilometers thick at its narrowest point Since the surface of the planetoid was entirely devoted to absorbing sunlight and converting it to energy, everyone lived in the smooth-walled rooms linked by tunnels that laced the interior of the asteroid The closed-in space was no problem for Ender--what bothered him was that all the tunnel floors noticeably sloped doard Froh the tunnels, especially the ones that girdled Eros's narrow circuravity was only half of Earth-nor was almost complete

There was also so about the proportions of the roos were too low for the width, the tunnels too narrow It was not a comfortable place

Worst of all, though, was the number of people Ender had no important memories of the scale of the cities of Earth His idea of a comfortable number of people was the Battle School, where he had known by sight every person elt there Here, though, ten thousand people lived within the rock There was no crowding, despite the amount of space devoted to life support and other machinery What bothered Ender was that he was constantly surrounded by strangers

They never let him come to know anyone He saw the other Command School students often, but since he never attended any class regularly, they remained only faces He would attend a lecture here or there, but usually he was tutored by one teacher after another, or occasionally helped to learn a process by another student, whoain He ate alone or with Colonel Graff His recreation was in a gym, but he rarely saw the same people in it twice

He recognized that they were isolating hi hi them no opportunity to become friends He could hardly have been close to most of them anyway--except for Ender, the other students were all well into adolescence

So Ender withdrew into his studies and learned quickly and well Astrogation and military history he absorbed like water; abstract iven a problem that involved patterns in space and time, he found that his intuition was more reliable than his calculation--he often saw at once a solution that he could only prove afternumbers

And for pleasure, there was the siame he had ever played Teachers and students trained hi the awesoa a single fighter in continuous maneuvers to find and destroy an enemy The computer-controlled enemy was devious and powerful, and whenever Ender tried a tactic he found the coainst him within minutes