# Search the Sky — Character guide

> Key figures in Search the Sky by Frederik Pohl.

- [Ross](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/ross.md): 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 sol
- [Helena](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/helena.md): 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 wa
- [Marconi](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/marconi.md): 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 Landowne
- [Bernie](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/bernie.md): 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 g
- [Haarland](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/haarland.md): 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
- [Ben Jones](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/ben_jones.md): 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 togethe
- [Sam Jones](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/sam_jones.md): Jones is the starship's resident intellectual, the one Ross nominates to make first contact with the unnervingly advanced people of Earth. But he greets the moment of humanity's greatest need pickled in a backslide, bell
- [Charles Oldham IV](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/charles_oldham_iv.md): Oldham never appears onstage, yet his shadow governs Ross's choices: quitting him for a purser's berth feels ethical, quitting him for Haarland feels like betrayal. Haarland calls him 'that pompous young fool' and still 
- [Cavallo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/cavallo.md): Cavallo runs the biggest firm on Novj Grad's south side, and Ross's visit to her works ends with him muttering 'stupid old bat' in the street — a blasphemy Helena gently scolds. She embodies Azor's rigid, conservative or
- [Doc Jones](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/doc_jones.md): Another Jones character, possibly a doctor or engineer.
- [The Judge](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/the_judge.md): An authority figure who presides over a trial or judgment.
- [Ma](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/ma.md): A maternal figure, possibly a crew member's mother.
- [Dobermann](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/dobermann.md): A character with a German-sounding name, possibly a scientist.
- [Pilot Breuer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/pilot_breuer.md): A pilot, likely of a spacecraft.
- [Doc Gibbons](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/doc_gibbons.md): A doctor, possibly a minor medical figure.
- [Scholar Dobermann](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/scholar_dobermann.md): A scholarly character, possibly a scientist or academic.
- [Junior](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/junior.md): A junior character, possibly a robot or young person.
- [Junior Dobermann](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters/junior_dobermann.md): A younger Dobermann, possibly a son or apprentice.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/search_the_sky_se/characters