Rabbit gets off at a stop in Penn Park and walks down a street of mock Tudor, Emberly Avenue, to where the road surface changes at the township line, and becomes Emberly Drive in Penn Villas. He lives on Vista Crescent, third house from the end. Once there may have been here a vista, a softly sloped valley of red barns and fieldstone farmhouses, but more Penn Villas has been added and now the view from any window is as into a fragmented mirror, of houses like this, telephone wires and television aerials showing where the glass cracked. His house is faced with apple-green aluminum clapboards and is numbered 26. Rabbit steps onto his flagstone porchlet and opens his door with its three baby windows arranged like three steps, echoing the door-chime of three stepped tones.

“Hey Dad,” his son calls from the living room, a room on his right the size of what used to be called a parlor, with a fireplace they never use. “They’ve left Earth’s orbit! They’re forty-three thousand miles away.”

“Lucky them,” he says. “Your mother here?”

“No. At school they let us all into assembly to see the launch.”

“She call at all?”

“Not since I’ve been here. I just got in a while ago.” Nelson, at twelve, is under average height, with his mother’s dark complexion, and something finely cut and wary about his face that may come from the Angstroms. His long eyelashes come from nowhere, and his shoulder-length hair is his own idea. Somehow, Rabbit feels, if he were taller it would be all right, to have hair so long. As is, the resemblance to a girl is frightening.

“Whadja do all day?”

The same television program, of people guessing and getting and squealing and kissing the m.c., is still going on.

“Nothing much.”

“Go to the playground?”

“For a while.”

“Then where?”

“Oh, over to West Brewer, just to hang around Billy’s apartment. Hey, Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“His father got him a mini-bike for his birthday. It’s real cool. With that real long front part so you have to reach up for the handles.”

“You rode it?”

“He only let me once. It’s all shiny, there isn’t a speck of paint on it, it’s just metal, with a white banana seat.”

“He’s older than you, isn’t he?”

“By four months. That’s all. Just four months, Dad. I’m going to be thirteen in three months.”

“Where does he ride it? It’s not legal on the street, is it?”

“Their building has a big parking lot he rides it all around. Nobody says anything. It only cost a hundred-eighty dollars, Dad.”

“Keep talking, I’m getting a beer.”

The house is small enough so that the boy can be heard by his father in the kitchen, his voice mixed with gleeful greedy spurts from the television and the chunky suck of the refrigerator door opening and shutting. “Hey Dad, something I don’t understand.”

“Shoot.”

“I thought the Fosnachts were divorced.”

“Separated.”

“Then how come his father keeps getting him all this neat junk? You ought to see the hi-fi set he has, that’s all his, for his room, not even to share. Four speakers, Dad, and earphones. The earphones are fantastic. It’s like you’re way inside Tiny Tim.”