Page 1300 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"Sounds like you've analyzed my personality anyway," said Bean. "You just don't let up, do you?"
Bean said nothing. There was nothing to say.
"I've been looking at your reading list," said Dimak. "Vauban?" "Yes?"
"Fortification engineering from the time of Louis the Fourteenth?"
Bean nodded. He thought back to Vauban and how his strategies had adapted to fit Louis's ever- more-straitened finances. Defense in depth had given way to a thin line of defenses; building new fortresses had largely been abandoned, while razing redundant or poorly placed ones continued. Poverty triumphing over strategy. He started to talk about this, but Dimak cut him off.
"Come on, Bean. Why are you studying a subject that has nothing to do with war in space?"
Bean didn't really have an answer. He had been working through the history of strategy from Xenophon and Alexander to Caesar and Machiavelli. Vauban came in sequence. There was no plan -- mostly his readings were a cover for his clandestine computer work. But now that Dimak was asking him, what *did* seventeenth-century fortifications have to do with war in space?
"I'm not the one who put Vauban in the library."
"We have the full set of military writings that are found in every library in the fleet. Nothing more significant than that."
Bean shrugged.
"You spent two hours on Vauban."
"So what? I spent as long on Frederick the Great, and I don't think we're doing field drills, either, or bayoneting anyone who breaks ranks during a march into fire."
"You didn't actually read Vauban, did you," said Dimak. "So I want to know what you *were* doing."
"I *was* reading Vauban."
"You think we don't know how fast you read?" "And *thinking* about Vauban?"
"All right then, what were you thinking?"