"Guess what, Meyverik?" I said viciously. "You're going to die."
"What the blazes are you babbling about?" the blond doll snapped at me from the box of the video screen.
I scanned the typed, stiff-backed Idiot Prompters Madison shoved into my fist. "It's—true. You can't get out alive."
"What's happened?" His face perfectly blank.
"Nothing out of the ordinary," I said. "They have just informed me it was planned this way. It wasn't possible to build a round-trip rocket yet. You need a lot of fuel to make course adjustments for the curvature of space, so forth. The radio will send back your reports on the Alpha Centaurian planets. Undoubtedly by all rules of probability they won't support life without a mass of equipment. They suckered me too, Meyverik, I swear. You turning back?"
"No," he said almost immediately.
"I thought you were after the rewards, trained to get them. You won't be able to enjoy them posthumously."
The video blanked. He had turned off his camera.
"I guess I thought so," Meyverik's voice said. "But I kind of like it out here—alone. I like people but back there there's no one to touch. They smother you but you can't reach them. I can't do anything better back there than I can do here."