Free Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series) by Don Pendleton

finally
returned home only to find a totally alien planet, and they're trying to figure
it out or to decide how best to merge back in with us.
    Don't
like that?
    Well
maybe we have a much more distant common origin. Donovan said the place ceased
to exist before man began on earth. Maybe our star was dying and everyone had
to bail out of that solar system. Maybe they had hundreds, even thousands, of
years warning so had plenty of time for an all-out technological effort to
launch some lifeboats into space. Maybe the lifeboats got separated—as
lifeboats often do—and they ended up in different worlds. Maybe the one that
came to earth crash-landed, or maybe everybody was sick, or maybe it was forty
generations after the launch before the setdown on earth and all the occupants
had lost their marbles or regressed or whatever scenario you prefer to explain
the almost total loss of knowledge and technology.
    Note
that I said almost total loss.
    There
are evidences around the globe of extremely ancient civilizations that seemed
to know more than those who descended from them. Take even the "creation
myth" of Genesis which scholars now believe to predate the Babylonians and
even the Sumerians, who lived in roughly the same place but at different times,
the Sumerians being older. Their language is the oldest written language on
earth, and the origins of the peoples themselves is lost in prehistory. Their
written language was in cuneiform script and today's scholars cannot forge a
relationship between that language and any other known on earth. Wonder where
it came from, and where it went.
    The
creation story told in the older writings in Genesis (there are several such
stories, sort of overlapped and bastardized by a succession of later writers)
shows what would seem to be an amazing understanding of cosmology from such a
primitive viewpoint. So much so that there really is no basic conflict between
the general story of creation in the Bible and the generally accepted
scientific theories of today, until you get to Adam and Eve in the garden at
Eden (which was a much later embellishment on the story).
    Of
course the language is quaint from our point of view because the story had come
through the mists of time and can be interpreted only through our present
understanding of language, but the true scholar is left with the eerie feeling
that he is reading a partially bastardized memory of greater truths once known.
    Beginning
with a universe of chaos and darkness from
    which the earth was
cast, then developing by successive stages the appearance of order, then of
plants, then animals, and finally man—the reader encountering this fragment of
a sentence would not know if it were quoting a scientific account or Genesis.
It happens to be both. And it represents the very earliest recorded thoughts of
man regarding his origins.
    So
where did prehistoric man get all this understanding?
    Maybe
it was one of the few tattered fragments left in a shattered lifeboat, and
maybe the survivors were too busy with the elemental tasks of adapting to an
alien and terrifying environment to devote much time to anything else,
especially to cultural luxuries. What did it serve you to know how the world
was made or how a shattered craft was powered from another world if wild beasts
are stalking you and you are cold and hungry? If you have no tools and none of
the materials with which you are familiar, what good is technology?
    Does
the average man or woman alive today have any really valid idea of how images
are flashed through space to come alive on their television screens? Can anyone
reading these words build a television station or even a receiving set with
bare hands and raw materials? Can anyone working alone and without modern
facilities build even a transistor? So if you are shipwrecked like Robinson
Crusoe will you devote your time to trying to figure out how to build a
television receiver or will you forage for food to stay alive?
    If
that is how it