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inside.
    Within another hour the concealing cloud was behind the ship and the dead world of the base floated on the screen. The ship brought itself in low over the scarred surface and drifted into the receiving tunnel through the sequence of locks, sliding finally into its familiar berth.
    Home , young Gorgias thought bitterly, all there is of it .
    Once, the core of the Empire had consisted of twenty worlds, all dead now. He still remembered the roll taught to him by his father: New Anatolia, Capital of the Empire; Gorgias, home of the Empire’s creators; Vis and Sivat, worlds of the mental arts; Lash and Bram, planets for soldiers; Indra, the water world; Avat and Rishna, where armorers built the instrumentalities of war; Rud and Panis, shipbuilding planets, where a few inspired designers, together with a team of fleeing armorers, had built the two known Whisper Ships; Nahus and Ush, places for the arts and architecture; Ganesa, a world for poets and songsingers; Manus, a world for historians and computer libraries; Yama, the wilderness where young soldiers went to test themselves; Jas, Ulys and Mizon, outer worlds for astronomers, physicists and scientific researchers of every kind. All this within a space of fifty light-years. The Cluster’s diameter of a hundred light-years contained ten thousand times as many stars as any equal volume of space. Here was room to grow, to concentrate creative energies, to create the greatest civilization in the galaxy; no wonder the Cluster had earned the Federation’s envy. Here the Herculean Empire would come to be again.
    He got up from the station and went aft to the side lock, which was already open. He stepped out into the stillness and looked around. The lights were still on around the stony berth. The metal door leading out from the chamber of six berths was still open. Suddenly he felt love for the base; it was strong and constant; self-maintaining, it would last forever.
    His father came out and stood beside him. “What will you need me for?” he asked.
    “I’ll need you to help me load two gravitic units and a tug-scooter.”
    “Right now?”
    “Yes — that’s all I came for.”
    Gorgias led the way from the berth, through the metal door and down the long corridor into the war room, around the table to another door. Pulling it open, they went through and followed a downward-sloping passage which led into a supply warehouse composed of a hundred interlocking chambers. There were a dozen levels below this area; the lowest floor housed the life-support devices, which were powered by the thermal energy of the planet’s core. As long as this world remained warm inside and the homeostatic slave intelligences continued to channel energy to the various systems, the base would live, its synthesizers producing air and foodstuffs, more than he would ever need. The berth would stock the ship with sufficient synthesizer mass and make subtle adjustments and repairs in the sealed submolar systems that received the energy to run the drive.
    At times it disturbed him to know that he understood so little of the ship or the base’s workings, but the great builders and armorers were gone and there was no one to teach him. Where, for example, was the power source for the Whisper Ship? Somewhere in the Cluster, but where? Where was the other ship, if there was one? Given enough time, he might come to understand more of what the base contained; but only the growth of a new population of Herculeans would be capable of retrieving the legacy of the past, bringing all the skills and knowledge out of the records and technical examples back into the container of living individuals, who could then shape new developments.
    “Where would the grav units be?” Gorgias asked.
    “In the wall closets,” his father said. “Most were never unpacked.”
    The lights in the room were dim. The greenish walls rose to a height of ten feet and met a gray ceiling. The air was cool and odorless. “I was