 Why does Dunbar continue to tell stories of an enchanting paradise?
TO EACH HIS STAR by BRYCE WALTON "Nothing around those other suns but ashes and dried blood," old Dunbar told the space-wrecked, desperate men. "Only one way to go, where we can float down through the clouds to Paradise. How could they believe in his choice when every star in this forsaken section of space was surrounded by a beckoning red rim? Dunbar, the oldest of the four, an old space-buster with a face wrinkled like a dried prune, burned by cosmic rays and the suns of worlds so far away they were scarcely credible, had taken command. Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line, taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where he was going. But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that old Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird. Russell had no idea now how long the four of them had been plunging toward the red-rimmed sun that never seemed to get any nearer. And Russell was looking at Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking about how Dunbar looked inside that suit—and hating Dunbar more and more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling optimism—because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and calling their destination Paradise. Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like strange seeds down the night winds of Venus. When the four of them had escaped from that prison colony on a sizzling hot asteroid rock in the Ronlwhyn system, that wasn't enough for Dunbar. no—Dunbar had to start talking about a place they could go where they'd never be apprehended, in a system no one else had ever heard of, where they could live like gods on a green soft world like the Earth had been a long time back. And Dunbar had spouted endlessly about a world of treasure they would find, if they would just follow old Dunbar. No one for God only knew how many of millions of light years away could see or care. "You're still sure it's the sun up ahead ...
 To motivate them to keep persisting until they arrive
 To motivate them to keep persisting until they arrive  To convince himself that he is choosing the correct star  To assuage his crewmen's minds before they inevitably die  To lure the Johnson, Alvar, and Russell into a trap