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Ender hated Eros from the moment he shuttled down from the tug. He had been uncomfortable enough onEarth, where floors were flat; Eros was hopeless. It was a roughly spindle-shaped rock only six and a halfkilometers thick at its narrowest point. Since the surface of the planet was entirely devoted to absorbing sunlightand converting it to energy, everyone lived in the smooth-walled rooms linked by tunnels that laced the interiorof the asteroid. The closed-in space was no problem for Ender -- what bothered him was that all the tunnel floorsnoticeably 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 Earthnormal-- 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 thewidth, 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 ofa comfortable number of people was the Battle School, where he had known by sight every person who dweltthere. Here, though, ten thousand people lived within the rock. There was no crowding, despite the amount ofspace devoted to iife support and other machinery. What bothered Ender was that he was constantly surroundedhy strangers.They never let him come to know anyone. He saw the other Command School students often, but since be neverattended any class regularly, they remained only faces. He would attend a lecture here or there, but usually hewas tutored y one teacher after another, or occassionally helped to learn a process by another student, whom hemet once and never saw again. He ate alone or with Colonel Graff. His recreation was in a gym, but he rarelysaw the same people in it twice.He recognized that they were isolating him again, this time not by setting the other students to hating him, butrather by giving them no opportunity to become friends. He could hardly have been close to most of themanyway -- 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 absorbedlike water; abstract mathematics was more difficult, but whenever he was given a problem that involved patternsin space and time, he found that his intuition was more reliable than his calculation -- he often saw at once asolution that he could only prove after minutes or hours of manipulating numbers.And for pleasure, there was the simulator, the most perfect videogame he had ever played. Teachers and第 271 页 共 340 页http://www.en8848.com.cn/ 原 版 英 语 阅 读 网