“Maybe we’ll do the erasing ourselves,” Rabbit offers helpfully. He wants to help, to hold his end up. Never too late for education. With Janice and old man Springer you could never have this kind of conversation.

“There is that death-wish,” Jill concedes.

Nelson will talk only to her. “Do you believe in life on other planets? I don’t.”

“Why Nelson, how ungenerous of you! Why not?”

“I don’t know, it’s silly to say—”

“Say it.”

“I was thinking, if there was life on other planets, they would have killed our moon men when they stepped out of the space ship. But they didn’t, so there isn’t.”

“Don’t be dumb,” Rabbit says. “The moon is right down our block. We’re talking about life in systems millions of light years away.”

“No, I think the moon was a good test,” Jill says. “If nobody bothered to defend it, it proves how little God is content with. Miles and miles of gray dust.”

Nelson says, “One guy at school I know says there’s people on the moon but they’re smaller than atoms, so even when they grind the rocks up they won’t find them. He says they have whole cities and everything. We breathe them in through our nostrils and they make us think we see flying saucers. That’s what this one guy says.”

“I myself,” Rabbit says, still offering, drawing upon an old Vat feature article he set, “have some hopes for the inside of Jupiter. It’s gas, you know, the surface we see. A couple of thousand miles down inside the skin there might be a mix of chemicals that could support a kind of life, something like fish.”

“It’s your Puritan fear of waste makes you want that,” Jill tells him. “You think the other planets must be used for something, must be farmed. Why? Maybe the planets were put there just to teach men how to count up to seven.”

“Why not just give us seven toes on each foot?”

“A kid at school,” Nelson volunteers, “was born with an extra finger. The doctor cut it off but you can still see where it was.”

“Also,” Jill says, “astronomy. Without the planets the night sky would have been one rigid thing, and we would never have guessed at the third dimension.”

“Pretty thoughtful of God,” Rabbit says, “if we’re just some specks in His mirror.”

Jill waves his point away blithely. “He does everything,” she says, “by the way. Not because it’s what He has to do.”

She can be blithe. After he told her once she ought to go outdoors more, she went out and sunbathed in just her bikini underpants, on a blanket beside the barbecue, in the view of a dozen other houses. When a neighbor called up to complain, Jill justified herself, “My tits are so small, I thought they’d think I was a boy.” Then after Harry began giving her thirty dollars a week to shop with, she went and redeemed her Porsche from the police. Its garage parking fees had quadrupled the original fine. She gave her address as Vista Crescent and said she was staying the summer with her uncle. “It’s a nuisance,” she told Rabbit, “but Nelson ought to have a car around, at his age, it’s too humiliating not to. Everybody in America has a car except you.” So the Porsche came to live by their curb. Its white is dusty and the passenger-side front fender is scraped and one convertible top snap is broken. Nelson loves it so much he nearly cries, finding it there each morning. He washes it. He reads the manual and rotates the tires. That crystalline week before school begins, Jill takes him for drives out into the country, into the farmland and the mountains of Brewer County; she is teaching him how to drive.