 What is the role of the pirate ship story that Dunbar tells?
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. How could they believe in his choice when every star in this forsaken section of space was surrounded by a beckoning red rim? After the wreck, the four of them had floated a while, floated and drifted together, four men in bulbous pressure suits like small individual rockets, held together by an awful pressing need for each other and by the "gravity-rope" beam. 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. Each suit had its own power-plant, reprocessing continuously the precious air breathed by the occupants, putting it back into circulation again after enriching it. Each suit a rocket, each human being part of a rocket, and the special "life-gun" that went with each suit each blast of which sent a man a few hundred thousand miles further on toward wherever he was going. 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.
 It helps to clarify what is true for the reader when the aliens find his body
 It proves that he knows where he's going and he had the right choice all along  It is a fantastic story meant to keep the crew entertained while floating in space  It points to who will rescue his body when he arrives at the planet  It helps to clarify what is true for the reader when the aliens find his body