# Muhlenhoff — Short Fiction character guide

> Muhlenhoff in Short Fiction by Frederik Pohl.

**Role:** supporting

**First appearance:** 0000-asteroid-of-the-damned

## Snapshot

A navigator trained to trust instruments over instinct, Muhlenhoff wakes alone in a chlorine-tainted room and calculates, with cold dread, that home is five hundred light-years away.

## Who they are

Herrell McCray is the kind of man who has learned to distrust common sense the way other men distrust strangers—when Jodrell Bank's reply arrives hours late, he does the math and accepts the impossible before he accepts the obvious. Stranded in an unknown chamber with a corroding atmosphere and a radio that answers only after an eternity, he is isolated by distance itself, his crew reduced to a droning voice in his helmet. His decision to act on instrument readings rather than panic sets the story's central problem: how a rational man proceeds when every fact he trusts has been quietly rewritten.

## In the story

### [The Engineer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_18_se/chapters/the-engineer)

The protagonist engineer who manages the undersea oil project, reflecting on his career and dismissing the crisis.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_18_se/characters/muhlenhoff
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_18_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_18_se/characters