Battlefield Earth by Hubbard, L. Ron

was a picture of a fox. And beside it was a black pole with two flags coming off it.
        
    Suddenly a quiver went through Jonnie. He held his breath. He grabbed the first object he had taken and pried it open again. There was the tent. There was the bee’s black mark. Yes- and there was the pole with two flags.
        
    He held the two rectangles, his head in a whirl. He stared at them.
        
    There was a meaning here. Foxes? Bees? Cats? Tents, bulges, new moons?
        
    These things had meanings in them!
        
    But about what? Animals? Weather?
        
    He could sort all that out later. He crowded the two rectangles into his belt pouch. Anything that was connected to weather and animals had value. Rectangles with meaning in them. The idea made bright lights pop in your skull.
        
    He replaced the protective sheet, went back out the window, replaced the metal covering as well as he could, and whistled Windsplitter over, dropping down to the horse’s back.
        
    Jonnie looked around him expansively. Who knew what things of enormous value were in the Great Village? He felt rich, excited.
        
    There was no reason at all for his people to stay cooped up there in the mountains. Here was shelter and to spare. Here was firewood growing in the streets. Here were rooms and rooms and rooms!
        
    And come to think of it, he felt better since he had been away from the mountain meadow. Better physically.
        
    And it hadn’t taken a year- actually just a few days.
        
    He gathered up the lead rope of his pack horse and they trotted briskly along the wide paths toward the eastern part of the Great Village.
        
    Although his eyes were busy taking it all in, his mind was engrossed in organizing a migration from the mountains down to this place: what he would have to pick up for evidence to convince them; what he was going to say to Staffor; how they could transport their goods…maybe build a cart? Maybe there were carts right here in the Great Village. He could round up some horses. These piles of red dust he saw along either side of the wide paths from time to time might once have been carts of a sort. It was hard to figure out what shape they had really had, they were so caved in. The impression of a wheel. Sheets of translucent rock. No, they hadn’t been horse carts, or had they? He began to look at such objects more closely.
        
    And then he saw the insect.
        

Battlefield Earth
    Chapter 12
        
    It was very bright daylight now. And there it sat. There could be no mistaking it.
        
    Alien.
        
    Surely it must be an insect. Only cockroaches looked like that. Or beetles. No, cockroaches.
        
    But there were no cockroaches that big. Not thirty feet long and ten feet high and maybe twelve feet side to side.
        
    A horrible brown color. And smooth.
        
    Jonnie had stopped, the lead horse bunched up behind. The thing was sitting squarely in the middle of the wide path. It seemed to have two eyes in front, slitted. There was nothing like this on the plains or in the mountains, and he had seen nothing like it in the Great Village center. It looked new, with very little dust on it, and shiny.
        
    He felt it was alive. There was something about it. Yes, alive. Not inanimate metal but a living thing. Then he saw what made him think so.
        
    There had been a slight rocking motion. Something moved behind the slitted eyes.
        
    Jonnie, making no sudden movements, turned Windsplitter and, pulling the lead horse, began to move away in the direction from which he had approached. He had already noted that these paths were mostly rectangular and that you could go all the way around a group of buildings and come back to the same place.
        
    There was open country to the east, not very far. He would go down a side path and then circle back and get out into the plains. Hopefully he could outrun it. If it