"Forget it," said the girl. "Just a mistake of mine. It's a waste of time telling any of them. But you looked intelligent and not quite dry behind the ears. I took pity on you."
She looked at him over the rim of her glass.
"I shouldn't have," she said.
"I should have listened."
"They never do," said Maxine.
"There's another thing," he said. "Why hasn't it leaked out? Oh, sure, I have written letters, too. I didn't admit what it was like. Neither did you. Nor the man next to you. But someone, in all the years we've been here - "
"We are all alike," she said. "Alike as peas in the pod. We are the anointed, the hand-picked, stubborn, vanity-stricken, scared. All of us got here. In spite of hell and high water we got here. We let nothing stand in our way and we made it. We beat the others out. They're waiting back there on Earth - the ones that we beat out. They'll never be quite the same again. Don't you understand? They had pride, too, and it was hurt. There's nothing they would like better than to know what it's really like. That's what all of us think of when we sit down to write a letter. We think of the belly laughs by those other thousands. The quiet smirks. We think of ourselves skulking, making ourselves small so no one will notice us -
She balled a fist and rapped against his shirt front.
"That's the answer, Buster. That's why we never write the truth. That's why we don't go back."
"But it's been going on for years. For almost a hundred years. In all that time someone should have cracked - "