These were the Vienna woods! How could he ever tell his mother and father? Heartsick, he returned to the Platz and found the Berlin stratoway.
In Berlin, his bitterness grew. He had known the Unter den Linden must have changed through the centuries, but he was not prepared for such a pace of life, such a frenzy of leisure. Better not to have left Andromeda. Better always to have lived with a dream.
The sight of two elderly burghers drinking beer reminded him of his own great grandfather, and gave him a heartening twinge of nostalgia. But as he stepped close to their table, he saw that as they sipped from their miniature steins the fingers of their free hands beat out a rhythmic accompaniment to the convolutions of an adagio team imaged on the table-top television screen.
The final irony came to him when he read the lines of Schiller, carved over the entrance to a museum near the Brandenburg Gate. Because they were cut deep into the old stone, they could not be erased or condensed. They were there to give their ironic message to a world that could no longer read them:
Only through the morning gateway of the beautiful did you enter the land of knowledge.
And beneath them was Schiller's immortal warning to the artist:
Der Menschheit Wurde ist in eure Hand gegeben,
Bewahret sie....
Walther copied the entire passage on the back of his Manual. This, at least, he could take back with him. These words he could preserve for the artists who would someday create their works of beauty on the frontier of Andromeda. As he copied them, Walther felt that the words were also a personal message from Schiller to himself:
The dignity of Mankind is placed in your hands,