Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000

by L. Ron Hubbard

Queer, thick rectangles stood on these shelves. Rows of them. At first he thought it was all one piece and then he found that one could remove a single rectangle. He took one off the shelf. It almost fell to pieces in his hands! Awkwardly, he juggled to hold it together and then succeeded. What a strange object! It was a box that wasn’t a box. The covers slid sideways away from each other, enclosing a packet of thin—remarkably thin—slices that had black marks on them, lots of little, tiny black marks all in orderly rows. What a strange object! How complicated!