wake up. We were able to hold off on the ... test ... so he's going to be in command, as usual, but ... not as usual."
"I'm ready. I always am."
"Yeah, but ... look, advance word on this test is that it's ... there's no ..."
"It's hopeless."
"Anything you can do to help. Any suggestion."
"This Dr. Device thing, Ender hasn't let us use it in a long time."
"The enemy learned enough about how it works that they never let their ships get close enough together for a chain reaction to spread. It takes a certain amount of mass to be able to maintain the field. Basically, right now it's just ballast. Useless."
"It would have been nice if you'd told me how it works before now."
"There are people who don't want us to tell you anything, Bean. You have a way of using every scrap of information to guess ten times more than we want you to know. It makes them a little leery of giving you those scraps in the first place."
"Colonel Graff, you know that I know that these battles are real. Mazer Rackham isn't making them up. When we lose ships, real men die."
Graff looked away.
"And these are men that Mazer Rackham knows, neh?"
Graff nodded slightly.
"You don't think Ender can sense what Mazer is feeling? I don't know the guy, maybe he's like a rock, but I think that when he does his critiques with Ender, he's letting his ... what, his anguish... Ender feels it. Because Ender is a lot more tired after a critique than before it. He may not know what's really going on, but he knows that something terrible is at stake. He knows that Mazer Rackham is really upset with every mistake Ender makes."
"Have you found some way to sneak into Ender's room?"
"I know how to listen to Ender. I'm not wrong about Mazer, am I?"
Graff shook his head.
"Colonel Graff, what you don't realize, what nobody seems to remember - that last game in Battle School, where Ender turned his army over to me. That wasn't a strategy. He was quitting. He was through. He was on strike. You didn't find that out because you graduated him. The thing with Bonzo finished him. I think Mazer Rackham's anguish is doing the same thing to him now. I think even when Ender doesn't consciously know that he's killed somebody, he knows it deep down, and it burns in his heart."
Graff looked at him sharply.
"I know Bonzo was dead. I saw him. I've seen death before, remember? You don't get your nose jammed into your brain and lose two gallons of blood and get up and walk away. You never told Ender that Bonzo was dead, but you're a fool if you think he doesn't know. And he knows, thanks to Mazer, that every ship we've lost means good men are dead. He can't stand it, Colonel Graff."
"You're more insightful than you get credit for, Bean," said Graff.
"I know, I'm the cold inhuman intellect, right?" Bean laughed bitterly. "Genetically altered, therefore I'm just as alien as the Buggers."
Graff blushed. "No one's ever said that."
"You mean you've never said it in front of me. Knowingly. What you don't seem to understand is, sometimes you have to just tell people the truth and ask them to do the thing you want, instead of trying to trick them into it."
"Are you saying we should tell Ender the game is real?"
"No! Are you insane? If he's this upset when the knowledge is unconscious, what do you think would happen if he knew that he knew? He'd freeze up."
"But you don't freeze up. Is that it? You should command this next battle?"
"You still don't get it, Colonel Graff. I don't freeze up because it isn't my battle. I'm helping. I'm watching. But I'm free. Because it's Ender's game."
Bean's simulator came to life.
"It's time," said Graff. "Good luck."
"Colonel Graff, Ender may go on strike again. He may walk out on it. He might give up. He might tell himself, It's only a game and I'm sick of it, I don't care what they do to me, I'm done. That's in him, to do that. When it seems completely unfair and utterly pointless."
"What if I promised him it was the last one?"
Bean put on his headset as he asked, "Would it be true?"
Graff nodded.
"Yeah, well, I don't think it would make much difference. Besides, he's Mazer's student now, isn't he?"
"I guess. Mazer was talking about telling him that it was the