"Madam, does that appeal to you?'

(It made me want to throw up.) ‘Unless something better comes along.'

‘If we can find such a client for you, he will be saved and held at your disposal. In the mean time we must find you someone else for coup, not let you sit among us naked of proper pride.'

That was a week ago and I have begun to feel just a hint of the idea that if I do not promptly find on their list a client I wish to terminate, then... just possibly... we don't want to hurry you... but still... if I don't make blood coup soon, how can I be trusted not to betray them to the Supreme Bishop's proctors?

On that Time Corps mission I carried out in Japan in the 1930s, I wish I had investigated those reports of another woman who might be me. If I had proved to myself that I was indeed tripled for 1937-8, then I would sleep better here now, as that third loop would hava to be further ahead on my personal time line... which would prove that I will get out of this mess still breathing.

That's the real trick: to keep breathing. Isn't it, Pixel? Pixel? Pixel! Oh, damn!

Changes - in 1972 Princess Polly died in her sleep - heart failure, I think, but I did not have an autopsy. She was a little old lady who had lived a long life and, I think, a happy one, on the whole. I said a prayer to Bubastis, asking her to watch for the arrival in the eternal Catnip Fields of a little black and white cat who had never scratched or bitten without just cause and who had had the misfortune to have had only one kitten - by Caesarean section and the kitten never opened its eyes - and then she had lost her kitten factory by spaying because her surgeon said that she could never have a normal litter and could not safely risk another pregnancy.

I did not get another kitten. In 1972 I was ninety years old (although I admitted only to fifty-nine... and tried my darnedest - exercise and diet and posture and cosmetics and clothes - to look forty). Being ninety in fact, it was possible, even likely, that another kitten would outlive me. I chose not to risk that.

I moved to Albuquerque because it had no ghosts for me. Kansas City was choked with ghosts of my past, of every sort, both sad and happy. I preferred not to drive by a site, such as our old home on Benton Boulevard, or where our old farmhouse out south had once been, then driving past would cover the happy used-to-be with dreary or unrecognisable what-is.

I preferred to remember Central High School the way it had been when my children attended it. In those days the scholastic records of Central's graduates at West Point and Annapolis and MIT and other ‘tough' schools caused Central to be rated as the finest secondary school in the west, equal in academics to the best preparatory schools, such as Groton or Lawrenceville - instead of what it had become: mostly babysitting for overgrown infants, a place where police prowl cars gathered every afternoon to stop fights, to confiscate knives, and to shake down the ‘students' for drugs - a ‘high school' where half the students should never have been allowed to graduate from grammar school because they could not read or write well enough to get along in the world outside.

Albuquerque held no ghosts for me; I had never lived them I had no children living there, no grandchildren. (Great-grandchildren? Well, maybe.) Albuquerque had had the good fortune (from my point of view) to be bypassed by moving roadway Route Sixty-Six. The old paved road numbered route 66 and once called ‘The Main Street of America' had run straight through Albuquerque, but roadcity Route Sixty-Six was miles to the south; one could not hear it or see it.

Albuquerque was favoured also through having been bypassed by many of the ills of the Crazy Years. Despite its size - 180.000 and growing smaller because of the roadcity south of it; such shrinkage was usual - it continued to have the sweet small-town feeling so common in the early twentieth century, so scarce in the second half. It was the home of the main campus of the University of New Mexico... a school blessed with a chancellor who had not given in to the nonsense of the sixties.

Students there had rioted (some of them) just once; Dr Macintosh kicked them out and they stayed kicked out. Parents screamed and complained at the state capital in Santa Fe; Dr Macintosh told the trustees and the legislature that there would be order and civilised behaviour on the campus as long as he was in charge. If they did not have the guts to back him up, he would leave at once and they could hire some masochistic wimp who enjoyed presiding over a madhouse. They backed him up.

In 1970 at campuses all over America half of all freshmen (or more) were required to take a course called ‘English A' (or something similar) but known everywhere as ‘Bonehead English'. When Dr Macintosh became chancellor, he abolished Bonghead English and refused to admit students who would have been required to take it. He announced, ‘It costs the taxpayers a minimum of seventeen thousand dollars a year to keep a student on this campus. Reading, writing, spelling, and grammar are grammar school subjects. If an applicant for admission to this university does not know these grammar school subjects well enough to get along here, let him go back to the grammar school that had dumped him untaught. He does not belong here. I refuse to waste tax money on him.'

Again parents screamed - but the parents of these subliterate applicants were a minority, while the majority of voters and legislators were discovering that they liked what they heard from Chancellor Macintosh.

After Dr Macintosh revised the university prospectos, it carried a warning that students were at all times subject to surprise tests for drugs-urine, blood, whatever. If they were caught - expulsion, no second chance.

A student who flunked a drug test found his quarters searched at once, all legal and proper, as there were seven judges in town willing night and day to issue search warrants on ‘probable cause'. No attention was paid to tender feelings; all who were caught in possession were prosecuted.

Especially for the benefit of drug dealers the legislature reinstituted a fine old custom: public hangings. Gallows were erected in plazas. To be sure, drug dealers sentenced to death always appealed to the state supreme court and then to Washington, but with five members including the Chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States having been appointed by President Patton, it worked out that drug dealers in New Mexico had little reason to complain of the ‘Law's Delays'. One bright young entrepreneur lived exactly four weeks from arrest to jack Ketch. The average time, once the system got rolling, was less than two months.

As usual, the ACLU had a fit over all these matters. Several ACLU lawyers spent considerable time in jail for contempt of court, not in the new jail, but in the drunk tank of the old jail, with the drunks, the hopheads, the wetbacks, and the quasi-male prostitutes.

These were some of the reasons I moved to Albuquerque. The whole country was losing its buttons, a mass psychosis I have never fully understood. Albuquerque was not immune but it was fighting back, and it had enough sensible men and women in key posts that it was a good place to live during the ten years I was there.

At the very time that America's schools and families were going to pieces the country was enjoying a renaissance in engineering and science, and not alone in such big items as space travel and roadcities. While students frivolled away their time, the research facilities of universities and of industry were turning out more good work than ever - in particle physics, in plasma physics, in aerospace, in genetics, in exotic materials, in medical research, in every field.

The exploitation of space flourished unbelievably. Mr Harriman's decision to keep it out of government hands, let private enterprise go at it for profit, was vindicated. While Pikes Peak Spaceport was still new, Spaceways Ltd was building bigger, longer, and more efficient catapults at Quito and on the Island of Hawaii. Manned expeditions were sent to Mars and to Venus and the first asteroid miners headed out.