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With present day inflation, theories are the cheapest commodity around, costing less than a penny a gross. It is better to stick with the available facts. Those facts are that one or more civilizations preceded early man and left behind magnificent megaliths as proof of their artistic and engineering abilities. Something destroyed those civilizations, or perhaps they destroyed themselves. Great civilizations have risen and died within the past two thousand years alone. Our own civilization may be following the same unhappy route, and two thousand years from now the Earth may again flip over on its axis. Great sheets of ice may bury the rubble of our cities. Silt and stones will wash over our towers and fortresses. And somewhere a handful of beings, w- Uda 228 ee et et tet 2 eit. ee a i: ae reduced to savagery by necessity, will tell tales around their camp fires about us and how we even dared to reach for the moon. Thousands of years after that, a new breed of anthropologist will collect those tales and scoff, even though all the tribes from all parts of the planet will have the same tales to tell. It is plainly impossible, those scientists will say, that any super civilization could have existed in prehistoric times. And primitive man could hardly have flown to the moon. It is folly to even listen to such nonsense. It's far more fruitful to measure and study those giant faces carved into Mount Rushmore... faces that are obviously replicas of ancient gods. Probably they were carved by the same primitives who erected that great ring of stones in the British Isles, they will observe sagely. In 1950 a new meteor raced across the horizon, spewing a long trail of crisp ideas that left the scientific establishment sputtering in rage. The meteor was a book dealing with history, astronomy, and archae. ology. It was written by a psychiatrist and published by a major Madison Avenue bouse. Science editors and book reviewers across the country greeted it with awe, comparing its author with Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. The public responded by making the book a best seller. It was titled Worlds in Collision and written by Dr Immanuel Velikovsky. Dr Velikovsky tore at the delicate underpinnings of modern science, applying excessive scholarship to the problems of how the planets were formed and what forces may have wrought changes in the Earth. Along the way he was obliged to invent new theories based upon the flimsy (by scientific standards) evidence of mythology. He dared to throw out some of science's most coveted concepts, substituting Ms own cosmology. The explosion followed almost immediately. The biggest names in astronomy and physics organized and fulminated. They set out to destroy this upstart by flooding his, publisher's office with vicious letters threatening to boycott the firm unless Velikovsky's book was withdrawn. Since the publisher also had a profitable sideline of textbooks and was heavily dependent upon the academic community for support, this ugly campaign had some effect. An assistant editor who had first suggested publishing the book was fired, and publication rights were turned over to another publisher who did not have a textbook business. Mankind is like a broken record repeating the same refrain over and over again. CHAPTER SEVEN SCIENTISTS IN COLLISION