 What enabled Ned to survive one million years after his car accident?
A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. It might move, speak, remember its past! With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine.
 The alkaline water in the pit
 The alkaline water in the pit  The arid desert climate  The black box technology  The Kar-Rah simulation technology