Page 199 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

universe far all to see. You have the soul of a stone, Colonel Graff, but I sing to a stone as easily as to another singer. You may go to your quarters and establish yourself."
"I have nothing to establish except the clothing I'm wearing."
"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-materialist. And yet you are unpleasantly fat. A gluttonous 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 much care, Admiral Chamrajnagar. I came here for Ender. And neither of us came here for you."
***
Ender hated Eros from the moment he shuttled down from the tug. He had been uncomfortable enough 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 planet 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 downward. From the start, Ender was plagued by vertigo as he walked through the tunnels, especially the ones that girldled Eros's narrow circumference. It did not help that gravity was only half of Earth-normal -- the illusion of being on the verge of falling was almost complete.
There was also something disturbing about the proportions of the rooms -- the ceilings 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 cities of Earth. His idea of a comfortable number of people was the Battle School, where he had known by sight every person who dwelt there. Here, though, ten thousand people lived within the rock. There was no crowding, despite the amount of space devoted to iife support and other machinery. What bothered Ender was that he was constantly surrounded hy strangers.
They never let him come to know anyone. He saw the other Command School students often, but since be never attended any class regularly, they remained only faces. He would attend a lecture here or there, but usually he was tutored y one teacher after