Free Logan's Search by William F Nolan Page A

said.
    “The day you came to my unit…to tell me about Doyle,” she began, her voice steady and resigned, “I was pretending. I pretended to be cold to the news of his suicide.”
    “You had me convinced,” said Logan.
    “The hard way I talked…the drinks…the part about Doyle being a fool. It was all an act. Actually, I was dying inside.”
    “But why the act?”
    “I’ll get to that. At the time, all that mattered was that I threw you off balance. I wanted to appear cool and sensual…make you desire me.”
    “Well, it worked.”
    “Exactly as I’d planned. Entice you to that party in Arcade, excite you, then have sex with you back at my unit—so I could plant the DD-15 in your jacket.”
    Logan twisted in the saddle to face her. “ You planted the Dust on me?”
    “I hated you. I blamed you for hounding my brother to suicide. I loved Doyle deeply…deeply…and I blamed you for his death.”
    Just as she did, thought Logan, in my world.
    “I wanted to avenge him, pay you back for what you’d done to him, to me…and planting that Dust on you seemed the best way.”
    “But Phedra was at Headquarters,” protested Logan. “ She was the one who accused both of us.”
    Jessica nodded. “She simply used an opportunity she never thought she’d get. You were right, she was jealous when she saw us together in Arcade—and she must have found the drug disc in my things when I was at the gallery.”
    “You took the disc there?”
    “Yes—to try to slip it into your jacket if my full plan didn’t work out, in case I couldn’t lure you back to my unit. Phedra saw her chance, and framed the whole story of us using the drug together.”
    “And she had no idea you intended planting it on me?”
    “No idea at all.” She smiled thinly. “But it certainly helped verify her story.”
    “But why tell me all this now?” asked Logan. “You didn’t have to.”
    She sighed, spilling out the words: “What you did for the boy, for Swala…I couldn’t hate you after that. You can’t help being what you are…the system gets us all eventually. It got you—and it got Doyle. All my life I’ve hated the system. It killed Doyle, and now it’s killing us.”
    Logan was hard-struck by her words. She was telling him the truth, he knew; it had been an act, her coldness, her lack of compassion—the things that had shocked and revolted him about her.
    She was like Jessica after all! They were as mentally alike as they were physically alike! And since she had told him the truth about herself, he owed her the same kind of honesty, if only to erase the image of the uniformed DS killer in her mind.
    “Turns out we were both putting on acts,” he declared.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I’m not the man you think I am. I’m not Logan 3.”
    Her eyes widened. ‘But you are! I’ve seen you on the tri-dims. I recognized you instantly when you came to my unit.”
    “I look like him—exactly like him—and his name is mine, but I’m no killer, Jess! I hate this system as much as you do, so much that I once helped destroy one just like it on my world.”
    And, as they rode, as the scorched brown land passed beneath them under the steady march of the marabunta and the sun fell slowly down the western sky, Logan told her everything. About the aliens, the dual worlds, his mission here…and about his own wife and child, his own Jessica.
    When he finished, she was crying softly, her head pressed forward against his shoulder, her arms tight around his waist.
    “I tried to kill you,” she sobbed. “I did this to you. How will you ever get back to her now? To the other me…to your son.”
    “I’ll do what Nyoka told me to do,” said Logan quietly. “He’s a wise man, Jess. He knows this land. There may really be a way out.”
    He kissed her cheek, gently.
    Ahead of them, blue and steep-rising and mysterious, at the far edge of the vast plain, the mountain waited.

     
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THE LEOPARD’S EYE
     
    And, at last, they