WELCOME

A Vignette of Tomorrow

by Alfred Coppel

The city awoke and looked at the sky. The waters of the canal—deep and still—rippled, and the shattered
minarets reflected there did a macabre dance as awareness returned. The sentient screens, feeble with age, revolved
with a searching, painful deliberation; they were the first mechanical movement in the city for millennia.
The restless wind—thin and cold—blew, as it always had, in from the red-silted bottom of the long-dry sea. Sand
drifted in the ruined streets; cold rime still patterned the broken windowpanes, unconscious of the feeble touch of the
faraway sun.
The city was in ruins. A slain city, with its ancient murder half-hidden by the mouldering touch of endless
centuries. The remnants of fey flying buttresses lay in the streets; the riparian esplanade, torn and sundered into
rubble, drank of the black canal water.
The wind whispered to the water, and the water to the sky. The screens, turning questingly on their frictionless
bearings, breathed life into the corpse of the city.
The city awoke and was afraid.
A relay clicked once and dissolved into dust, but the impulse born in the instant of destruction soared into the
blue air, fanning out across breathless miles with the speed of sunlight. Higher and higher, out of the cobalt day into
the void. It touched metal and fled back—back to the city, shrieking with electronic terror. The screens caught it, and
a wheel turned deep under the bomb-gutted city.
A vat of mercury rippled; an electron tube glowed, and a brain calculated. Far above, machinery creaked and a
bronze door shifted and crumbled under tons of shifting sand. One winged craft survived the rain of silt from above; it
rolled down a ramp into a cradle.
Fear beat through the city, like a pulse—fear and ancient hatred. A pointer swung rustily through a half arc. The
winged thing in the cradle slipped into the bowels of the city, through lead valves.
Cadmium bars slid free of their tunnels in a glowing hive. The winged thing's mouth opened greedily on green
and pitted hinges; it sucked hungrily at the death within the leaden furnace. Charged with vengeance, the winged
thing climbed along a conveyor that dissolved into rust as its work was done.
The electronic brain whispered to the tiny brain of the winged thing. It whispered of war and danger and death
and sun fires in the ancient streets.
A sighing valve opened in darkness. The cradle laid the winged thing in its tube. Gears, shattered by time, but still
able, pointed the tube at the sky.
The winged thing sprang forth into the blue air, fire behind and death in its teeth, the last defense of a millennia-
old war...

***

"There. Did you see it? From that dark patch on the very edge of the Lake of the Sun."
"A streak of flame, wasn't it? Like—"
"Like a rocket-trail."
"Impossible."
"But why? We must be within detection range now. And if—mind you I say if—there should actually be life on
Mars... that's nonsense, I know... but couldn't it be someone coming out to us? After all, this is the first attempt to
reach Mars. Wouldn't there be some sort of—well, welcome?"