The one-on-one sessions with Kelly Block were over. A few of the Owls, like Fahd, had actually enjoyed them. Fahd said Block had made him feel better about himself and his role on the Screech Owls. Others had hated their time with the sports psychologist–but no one as much as Nish.

Kelly Block was trying to work on the team’s “chemistry,” Travis reminded himself. Well, he supposed there was good chemistry and bad chemistry. He remembered Mr. Hepburn, the science teacher back home, demonstrating how some things mix and others do not. Mr. Hepburn had sprinkled salt into a beaker of water, and the class had watched as the granules dissolved and were soon, with some stirring, gone altogether–the salty taste the only evidence that anything had been added. Then Mr. Hepburn had taken a small, seemingly harmless piece of material called magnesium and, using forceps to carry it and wearing protective glasses over his eyes, had dropped the tiniest piece into the water–and the explosion had shattered the beaker!

Kelly Block and Nish, Travis supposed, were a bit like water and magnesium.

The morning after the disastrous game against the Werewolves, Kelly Block had summoned six players to his office: Travis, Sarah, Lars, Jesse, Andy, and Jenny. A goaltender and five players–a full unit.

He brought them into a room off his office, a room with bean-bag chairs and soft couches and thick rugs. He suggested they stretch out and relax.

Travis lay on one of the rugs, looking up at the slowly turning ceiling fan and trying to see into the main office. Kelly Block certainly had all the best equipment for running Camp Victory. There were computers and video monitors and bookcases stretching around most of the room. There were model airplanes and model birds hanging from the ceiling, and a miniature basketball net against the door and two small basketballs carefully set on Kelly Block’s big black desk. Everything–paper, books, tapes–was in perfect order.

“You may wonder why you six are here,” Block began.

No one said a word.

“That’s why we do our psychological testing,” he continued. “The questions may not make any sense to you–I know, I giggled too, the first time I saw some of them–but in the end you cannot fool the system. If you answer the way you think I want you to, you end up tricking yourself on the next question, and so on…”

Travis’s mind had already begun to wander. He wondered if the others were listening. But he could see nothing but the big fan above his head slowly turning.

“I ran your sheets through the computer, did some number crunching, talked to each member of the team, and identified the six of you as team ‘generators.’ That’s not quite the same thing as team ‘leaders,’ so don’t get the wrong idea. You are all leaders, too, but more important, you generate the energy this team draws from. You inspire with your play. You motivate with your emotion. You command respect with your personality…”

Travis smiled smugly to himself. This wasn’t so bad. He liked being a “generator.”

“We have, gathered here, a goaltender, two defence and three forwards. The Russians, as you know, play the game in five-man–sorry, five-person–units, not defence pairings and forward lines. Better chemistry. I’ve identified Jenny as our goaltender of choice and you five as our premier unit.”

“Our?” Travis wondered. Since when did Kelly Block belong to the Screech Owls hockey team? And did he talk this way to all teams? What if Muck were here? What would he think? And where was Dmitri? How could Kelly Block dare call something a “Russian unit” and not include the only Russian on the team? And what of Jeremy? If Jenny was the “goaltender of choice,” what was Jeremy? The goaltender of second choice?

It was getting warm in the room. Kelly Block’s voice began to take on a purring quality. The fan turned slowly, slowly…

Travis tried to stay with Kelly Block this time. He was talking about “generators” and “envisioning” and “imaging” and “focus,” and Travis’s own focus was beginning to slip again. He wondered how the others were hanging in, but he couldn’t see anyone. And he didn’t think he should turn his head or sit up to look. There could be no doubt that Kelly Block was sitting there, staring at the six of them, watching them…

“Let’s head for the hoodoos!”

Sarah’s suggestion had been enthusiastically endorsed by the rest of the “Unit,” as the six Screech Owls were now referring to themselves. They had spent nearly two hours with Kelly Block and, Travis was pleased to note, Block had never realized that at least one of the Unit had dozed off in the middle of his presentation. Jesse claimed he, too, had fallen asleep. Jenny said she had just got bored and lost her train of thought.

They weren’t much impressed with Kelly Block’s inspirational address to the generators, but they did like his suggestion that they head out on the mountain bikes–just the six of them–for some critical “bonding” before the next game.

“If he wants us to bond,” Andy said, “why doesn’t he just glue us to each other?”

But Travis and Sarah knew what Kelly Block meant. Perhaps he had gone overboard, but there was something to be said for being a true team and having to depend on each other, whether falling backwards from a chair or breaking out of one’s own end. A bike ride in the barren hills across the river seemed a perfectly good idea.

Travis and Lars exchanged a quick glance.

The hoodoos.

Where Nish had imagined he saw the Albertosaurus.

“Maybe we’ll see a Tyrannosaurus rex,” Lars whispered.

Travis giggled and kicked his pedal hard, doing a slight wheelie out onto the highway.

The air was warm on Travis’s face. He felt happy with his friends–the Unit. He had almost forgotten about poor Nish’s run-in with his own panicking imagination.

Poor Nish. Maybe they’d be able to see whatever it was that he had taken for an Albertosaurus.

Maybe they’d be able to show him that it had been nothing but his mind playing tricks on him.

Was it warm enough, Travis wondered, for Nish to have seen a mirage?