 What is Ned Vince's ultimate fate?
A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... "See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. 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. 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. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... 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. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. 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. 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 chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details.
 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