 What is Ned Vince's ultimate fate?
A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... 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. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. 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.
 He is tranquilized and moved to a simulation of his previous life, where the Kar-Rah can continue to study him
 He is tranquilized and moved to a simulation of his previous life, where the Kar-Rah can continue to study him  He dies in a fatal car crash by drowning at the bottom of a deep pit of water  His body is put on display in a museum managed by the Kar-Rah  He wakes up to discover that the car wreck and experience with Loy Chuk was all a dream