Logan's Search Read Free

threatened to burst his bones, sunder his flesh.
    Relief came in the form of a cool needle-stab, rendering him instantly unconscious.

    When he awoke, the alteration process had been painlessly completed.
    Logan sat up on the ship’s medtable. He was wearing the black uniform of a Sandman.
    Behind their protective wall of shimmering crystals, the three alien light-forms pulsed and merged, sending their words into Logan’s newly awakened mind: You are displeased, Logan?
    Because the crystal wall muted their radiance, Logan was able to look directly at his captors without shielding his eyes. They were like miniature suns, flickering cores of flame, without solid form.
    “You didn’t tell me I was replacing a Sandman,” he said. “The system’s dead. This uniform is meaningless now on Earth.”
    Not where you go.
    “The Thinker’s dead, and the world is free,” declared Logan. “The Sandmen are finished.” 
    Same reply: Not where you go.
    Logan was confused; he reached up to finger the bones of his chin.his cheeks and forehead…seeking the new shape of flesh. But it was impossible to tell what they had done to him.
    “Who am I? I want to see myself. A mirror—do you have one?”
    In the adjoining chamber.
    To Logan’s right, a tall silver slidepanel whispered back. 
    Your mirror is there.
    Logan entered the chamber, the panel sliding closed behind him. He stood in total darkness, nervous and uncertain.
    What would he see? Whose face did he wear? Would it be a Sandman he’d known at DS Headquarters?
    A sudden pillar of light. Inside the pillar, suspended between floor and ceiling and supported by clusters of floating diamonds, was the naked figure of a sleeping man.
    Logan moved closer to stare in silent shock at the Earthman he was to replace.
    Your mirror, Logan 3.
    He was staring at himself!
    Logan slowly circled the figure. “Is this…some kind of robot?” 
    He is quite real. A human of flesh and blood, as you are.
    Logan studied the face of the sleeping man: his own. The hands: his own. The body: his own. Hair, mouth, curvature of cheek and chin: his own.
    “You’ve altered another man to look exactly like me!”
    The reverse is true , the aliens told him. We have altered you to look exactly like him. Since he is over a decade younger than you, we had to erase certain lines in your face, subtly rework your body flesh, alter the pores of your fingers to match his. Now the two of you are identical.
    The pillar gradually dimmed as the Logan mirror-figure dissolved in a soft flicker of diamonds. Fading…gone…swallowed in blackness.
    The silver wallpanel once again hushed open behind Logan, and he walked numbly back into the medchamber.
    He faced the aliens.
    It was necessary for you to see him in order to understand your mission.
    Logan’s jaw was hard-set; he glared at the flickering flame shapes. “Damn you! What kind of trick is this?”
    No trick, Logan. The man you saw is a younger version of yourself. 
    “Version?”
    From another Earth. A parallel world, in which Sandmen still pursue runners. On that world he was fanatically loyal to the system of computer-directed death at twenty-one—the same system you helped end forever on your own planet.
    Logan felt himself caught in a dream from which he could not wake—yet he knew this was no dream. It was real. It was all actually happening to him. To maintain his base of emotional sanity, he had to keep telling himself this, over and over. No dream…no dream.
    From the wall, a shapechair appeared.
    Sit down, Logan. Watch what we show you. Watch—and listen.
    Without choice, Logan obeyed. The chair shaped itself around him as the room darkened.
    Holographic images materialized: an emerald universe of endless depth. Like a mute god, Logan sat surrounded by an infinity of stars and planets, silver-dusted galaxies, exploding nebulae.
    The cool, emotionless voice of the aliens entered his mind: Each planet in universal space is paralleled by many