Search the Sky

Ross

Ross is a trader's junior who stumbles onto the secret of a faster-than-light ship and the vanished colonies it could reach, making him the reluctant center of a mission to find out why the stars have gone quiet. His solid, fair-minded decency keeps colliding with worlds that answer curiosity with interrogation rods and gentle, smiling cruelty. He matters because his stubborn insistence on asking the right questions is what carries the search forward when everyone else has learned to stop.

Helena

Helena handles the ship with a swooping, timber-shivering recklessness that terrifies her crewmates even as it gets them where they need to go. She bristles at being called ugly by strangers and cries in a preoccupied way when frightened, but she never stops flying. Her willingness to take the controls—and her refusal to be cowed—makes her the crew's engine as much as its pilot, and her sharp instincts repeatedly save them from the traps waiting on each new world.

Marconi

Little Marconi stands four ranks above Ross in seniority, but the two juniors share lunch and confidences across the rival firms of Oldham and Haarland. He is rapturously, fatuously engaged to Lurline of the Old Landowners, waving a photo inscribed 'with crates of love' and reciting the child-bearing clauses of their contract as if they were poetry. Ross privately thinks him gaffed like a sugar perch, but Marconi's openness—and his willingness to listen—makes him the sounding board Ross needs before the mission begins.

Bernie

Bernie punctuates crises with a long, mumbling catalogue of his own feeblemindedness—fatheaded, goggly-eyed, no-browed, slobber-lipped—while somehow staying in the thick of things. He is the one who spots the disguised gun-truck bearing down on them, and the one whose panic Ross has to silence before they can think. His jittery alertness and self-deprecating humor give the crew a human edge, reminding readers that these are not heroes but frightened people far from home.

Haarland

Haarland is the keeper of a terrible inheritance: the knowledge that the nucleophoretic effect behind the F.T.L. drive is also a weapon that can annihilate solar systems, which is why humanity's colonizers erased it from every record but one man per planet. He speaks of the danger not to the uncaring galaxy but to 'the sparse fester of life that called itself humanity,' and his face goes queerly gray when he admits there are things worse than war. His confession sets Ross on the mission and gives the story its moral weight.

Ben Jones

Doc Jones staggers into the control room loaded to the gills, bellowing a bawdy ballad about seven-sided doors and purple-colored curbing before remembering there are ladies present. Ross begs him to pull himself together before they meet the advanced people of Earth, but Jones goes pale and stumbles out again. His drunkenness is comic, yet his role as the outfit's scientist makes his collapse a real liability—and his absence forces Ross to speak for them all when they face the incomprehensible Earthfolk.