Page 1343 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"No, sir. Did you write it?"
"I'm no scholar, Dimak, you know that. In fact, this was written by a student." "At Command School?"
"A student here."
At that moment Dimak understood why he had been called in. "Bean."
"Six years old. The paper reads like a work of scholarship!"
"I should have guessed. He picks up the voice of the strategists he's been reading. Or their translators. Though I don't know what will happen now that he's he's [sic -- should be a single "he's"] been reading Frederick and Bulow in the original -- French and German. He inhales languages and breathes them back out."
"What did you think of this paper?"
"You already know it's killing me to keep key information from this boy. If he can write *this* with what he knows, what would happen if we told him everything? Colonel Graff, why can't we promote him right out of Battle School, set him loose as a theorist, and then watch what he spits out?"
"Our job isn't to find theorists here. It's too late for theory anyway."
"I just think ... look, a kid so small, who'd follow him? He's being wasted here. But when he writes, nobody knows how little he is. Nobody knows how young he is."
"I see your point, but we're not going to breach security, period." "Isn't he already a grave security risk?"
"The mouse who scutters through the ducts?"
"No. I think he's grown too big for that. He doesn't do those side-arm pushups anymore. I thought the security risk came from the fact that he guessed that an offensive fleet had been launched generations ago, so why were we still training children for command?"
"From analysis of his papers, from his activities when he signs on as a teacher, we think he's got a theory and it's wonderfully wrong. But he believes his false theory *only* because he doesn't know about the ansible. Do you understand? Because that's the main thing we'd have to tell him about, isn't it?"
"Of course."