 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 ... Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. 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.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. 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. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. 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. Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. It might move, speak, remember its past! With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine. Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition.
 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