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a primitive-looking thing. Even though AIDS hasn’t reared its ugly head yet, I find the needle point especially terrifying. I look at the barrel of the glass syringe.
    “You’ve got half a cc there. A gram? You’re popping a whole gram of speed?”
    “The more I use, the more I need. Check for a vein, will you?”
    I rub my fingertip over the inner surface of her arm until I feel a linear swelling below the skin. My wire tells me that’s the place.
    I say, “I think there’s one here but I can’t see it.”
    “Feeling’s better than seeing any day,” she says with a smile. “Do it.”
    I push the needle through the skin. She doesn’t even flinch.
    “Pull back on the plunger a little,” she says.
    I do, and see a tiny red plume swirl into the chamber.
    “Oh, you’re beautiful!” she says. “Hit it!”
    I push the plunger home. As soon as the chamber is empty, the Speed Queen yanks off her tourniquet and sighs.
    “Oh, man! Oh, baby!”
    She grabs me and pulls me to the floor.
    I lie in bed utterly exhausted while Sally runs around the apartment stark naked, picking up the clutter, chattering on at Mach two. She is painfully thin, Dachau thin. It almost hurts to look at her. I close my eyes.
    For the first time since my arrival, I feel relaxed. I feel at peace. I don’t have to worry about YD because I’ve had the routine immunizations against syphilis and the clap and even hepatitis B and C and AIDS. About the worst I can get is a case of crabs. I can just lie here and feel good.
    It wasn’t easy getting here, and it’s been even harder staying. I thought I’d prepared myself for everything, but I never figured I’d be lonely. I didn’t count on the loneliness. That’s been the toughest to handle.
    The music got me into this. I’ve been a fan of the old music ever since I can remember—ever since my ears started to work, probably. And I’ve got a good ear. Perfect pitch. You sit me down in front of a new piece of music, and guaranteed I’ll be able to play it back to you note for note in less than half an hour—usually less than ten minutes for most things. I can sing, too, imitating most voices pretty closely.
    Trouble is, I don’t have a creative cell in my body. I can play anything that’s already been played, but I can’t make up anything of my own to play. That’s the tragedy of my life. I should be a major musical talent of my time, but I’m an also-ran, a nothing.
    To tell you the truth, I don’t care to be a major musical talent of my time. And that’s not sour grapes. I loathe what passes for music in my time. Push-button music—that’s what I call it. Nobody actually gets their hands on the instruments and wrings the notes from them. Nobody gets together and cooks. It’s all so cool, dispassionate. Leaves me cold.
    So I came back here. I have a couple of relatives in the temporal sequencing lab. I gained their confidence, learned the ropes, and displaced myself to the 1960s.
    Not an easy decision, I can assure you. Not only have I left behind everyone and everything I know, but I’m risking death. That’s the penalty for altering the past. But I was so miserable that I figured it was worth the risk. Better to die trying to carve out a niche for myself here than to do a slow rot where I was.
    Of course, there was a good chance I’d do a slow rot in the 1960s as well. I’m no fool. I had no illusions that dropping back a hundred years or so would make me any more creative than I already wasn’t. I’d be an also-ran in the sixties, too.
    Unless I prepared myself.
    Which I did. I did my homework on the period. I studied the way they dressed, the way they spoke. I got myself wired with a wetchip encoding all the biographies and discographies of anyone who was anybody in music and the arts at this time. All I have to do is think of the name and suddenly I know all about him or her.
    Too bad they can’t do that with music. I had to bring the music with me. I wasn’t stupid,