Time Dancer and the Potion of Invincibility

By Robert William Hult

When fourteen-year-old Bing Brown, who lives in the Met-how Valley, Third Dimension, loses his home and his entire family to a house fire, he is devastated. But he has no idea how drastically this event with change his life.

Bing meets an old-looking person who calls himself the Time Dancer and soon learns that Adabega, a Fifth Dimension shapeshifter, is responsible for the fire. The villain seeks a magic Tang mirror that would enable him to take over time for his own nefarious purposes. Bing also learns that he may be able to bring his beloved family back to lifeby changing the course of past time. In order to accomplish this improbable task, he must locate seven difficult-to-find ingredients of an ancient Potion of Invincibility. This would will give him a fighting chance against the cunning and wicked Adabega, whom Bing must confront on his home ground at the beginning of time. Only then will he have a chance to save his family.

In this fantasy novel, a teenage boy turns to a mysterious mentor to guide him through the process of facing a tremendous evil and bringing his family back to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Sep 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781480835757

Robert William Hult

Robert William Hult has lived a long life filled with many different kinds of adventures. He has been a scholar, an explorer, a marine animal and bird trainer, an accomplished novelist, a retailer, and a submariner. Many of his exploits are the subjects of his novels. Robert believes not only in faith, but in total preparation, and if not for both, and an intervention here and there, some of his adventures surely would have ended in death. In fact, he has already survived a dozen near death experiences.

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Copyright © 2016 Robert William Hult.

Cover design by Matt Love.

Illustrations by Jacob Rees.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, places, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Archway Publishing

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-3574-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-3576-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-3575-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016913112

Archway Publishing rev. date: 9/23/2016

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE A Ghastly House Fire

CHAPTER TWO A Momentous Meeting

CHAPTER THREE Avoiding Adabega

CHAPTER FOUR Dancing in a Timestream

CHAPTER FIVE Adabega, the Treacherous

CHAPTER SIX Lessons Three, Four and Five

CHAPTER SEVEN The Court of the Dead

CHAPTER EIGHT Of Ancient Reptiles and Elusive Jaguars

CHAPTER NINE Shaman Magic

CHAPTER TEN Time and Deep Sea Trouble

CHAPTER ELEVEN Poseidon’s Temple

CHAPTER TWELVE Secrets and Cetaceans

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Rendezvous with Rhinos

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Adabega’s Dark Secrets

CHAPTER FIFTEEN A Ghoulish Wedding

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Losing Ground

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Price of Victory

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although the characters in these stories are fictitious, the setting, the Met-how Valley, is a real place, known, loved, and visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year. For a hundred years, miners, farmers, and foresters have called it, God’s High Country. Translated from the Salish language of the Native Americans’, who first settled the valley, Met-how means the gathering place or the meeting place, which is appropriate since Bing Brown meets Tammud Tammur in the Met-how Valley. Here is where the author spent more than half of his adult life, working and playing alongside local people. I have changed a few Met-how Valley locations in this series of books so that they do not significantly impact residents, current and future. For a long time, the Meth-ow Valley has been a mecca for cross-country skiers, mountaineers, hikers, hunters, fishermen, and tourists.

No book, like no film, is the product of any one person. At all levels of writing, design, production, reviewing, marketing, and distribution there are people instrumental to a book’s success. There are also retailers and buyers that an author will never meet, but are also worthy of mention.

I wish to acknowledge Frances Fay Brewster, a loving companion for thirty years, who backed-up this work in many different ways.

The Time Dancer Franchise started as a screenplay I intended to take to Warner Brothers. David Eyre, a screenwriter for Warner Brothers, overviewed the script and thought it would make a great film, but he also thought it had wider potential. On his advice, I started writing a trilogy. That was what filmmakers at the time thought marketable. Thus the Time Dancer series of books was born. Currently, six of twelve novels have been written, and three have been line edited and illustrated. The one you hold in your hand, Time Dancer and the Potion of Invincibility, is the first novel of the series. At a rate of about one a year, eleven others will follow.

The name of the series, Time Dancer stems from an unusual circumstance. Gabrielle Childers, and her husband, Louis, former owners and now managers of the long-lived WolfRidge Resort of the Met-how Valley, bought and dressed their darling four-year-old in a lovely tee-shirt that displayed the name Star Dancer. When I was out one early evening photographing Jennifer on the rocks on the Met-how River, rays of sunlight flowed over her strawberry blonde hair. The Dancer part of the word lighted up from the sun rays and the Time part was representative of the time of day. Hence, Time Dancer was born and lives on.

The team of Darin M. Gearhart and Fred Wagner partly financed this project. Through thick and thin, they have remained stalwart in its production and marketing.

I also wish to thank Stephen F. Hult, a younger brother, who currently lives with me and has taken on many duties, which allows me free time from some my responsibilities to continue to work on this Time Dancer series of books.

Although I self-edited this book numerous times, Sheli Ellsworth was its first professional editor. She is a reviewer for many different influential publications and offered valuable criticism, great editing, and a five-star review when she thought the book warranted it. Thank you, Sheli. Since then, the book has received many five-star reviews.

Next, I wish to acknowledge the efforts of my brilliant young interior illustrator, Jacob Rees. It was his novel idea for using Bing Brown’s point of view as the object of his illustrations for each chapter beginning. My best idea was giving him full reign over the drawings.

My other illustrator, Rob Carlos (Colorsmith.com), has been my other inspiration. He has provided color illustrations for books that are yet to be published. In fact, some of the illustrations he did for his purposes, proved to be bases for stories that appear in some of the novels.

Another wonderful artist, Matt Love (Matt Love Design) illustrated the covers of the books. His first cover design was initiated by Carol Itoh (Itoh Publishing), who decided that Time Dancer 1 should, at the very least, be an e-book. I have carried on Matt’s cover designs throughout the series. Thank you, Carol and Matt.

My Check-In Coordinator for Archway, the Simon and Schuster affiliate, was Heather Perry. Even at times when I was frustrated or overzealous, she was calm and professional in explaining the rules of the road about her company’s plan of action. I had already self-published the original Time Dancer (hegemony press.org) in 2004, but I found that Archway had its own rigorous publishing requirements, which, in time, I realized were beneficial.

I also wish to thank Michael Eisner, who, when he was CEO of Disney, thought enough of the Time Dancer 1 screenplay that he passed it to his Creative Director. This thoughtful gentleman (who shall remain anonymous) gave me a critique, which led to my changing several twists in the storyline and which have made this particular book even more exciting and involved.

Another person who aided this volume was Scott Crenshaw, Marketing Consultant for Archway Publishing. For months we were in, and continue to be in, nearly constant contact on how best to market not only this book, but the entire series.

Finally, I wish to thank the Design Team of Archway Publications for their efforts based on my suggestions on what both the interior and exterior of Time Dancer and the Potion of Invincibility should look like and how it should read.

To everyone else, who I will never know, that assisted in the success of this book, and to readers who appreciate the decades of continuous effort that have gone into this book, and into this series, I thank you from the bottom of my heart to the top of my head.

Robert William Hult

Author and Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

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A GHASTLY HOUSE FIRE

T here is a particular event in each person’s life that changes it forever. That incident for fourteen-year-old Bing Brown was about to happen. Bing’s mother had said to him, Flames and evil have one thing in common. Improperly extinguished, they have a way of resurrecting themselves. What she had said was important today because he saw a forest fire in the area of his home on Cougar Creek.

Shoulder-length, coal-black hair whipped his red and white flannel hunting shirt while he pedaled his mountain bike even faster up a slight grade. The teenager’s mind raced in different directions. He didn’t usually travel so fast on this particular stretch of road on his way home from Winthrop, Washington, in the middle of the day, but it was early Autumn, and tinder-dry grass was knee-high in many places near his house. That was only part of what worried him; also, a threat was the thick sawdust all around his house from his father’s hobby of carving bears from logs. Bing Brown watched the distant smoke thicken. His breathing was labored. He tried matching his breaths to his pedaling.

As he pedaled closer to home, he saw thicker smoke, higher and more ominous, billow into the afternoon sky. According to his father, a volunteer firefighter, it meant that someone’s house was burning. Not only would be the siding of a house burn, so would everything inside.

He arrived where the paved county road stopped, and the private gravel road leading to his house and the Smith’s house started. The smoke was denser and darker, and he could smell it. It had an acrid quality, different than any smoke from any other fire to which his father had taken him.

The day was October 2, 1994, and while the sun shone down obliquely through the afternoon sky, Bing’s frantic mind recognized something else strange about the smoke. While most of it rose skyward, some of it eerily curled back to the ground and settled into the forest.

Weird. What would cause that? he wondered.

Just then, a big, brown mule deer sporting velvet on his antlers darted out of the forest and ran right in front of his bike. It angled off but brushed so close to his front wheel that Bing smelled him through the smoke. He saw that the buck’s sharp, four-point antlers were sharp and that its brown left eye rolled to ivory as they were about to collide.

Bing gasped and sucked in a breath.

As quick as the animal had appeared, it took an impressive sidewise jump and headed back into the evergreen forest.

Whew, that was too close. Bing sighed relief and glanced down at the speedometer; it read six kilometers per hour. His hand was no longer on the brake but the inside of his palm ached. He stared into the distance ahead, where smoke now curled across the road. When he was forced to take a breath, he found the air pungent, worse even than the smell of burning couches and bedding. Something was differently noxious about the strange odor. Dread filled his thoughts. The volunteers better fight this. A terrifying thought struck him.

What if the smoke isn’t coming from Jim’s house? What if it’s coming from our house? A sense of dark foreboding spread through his brain. As he pedaled closer to home, the uncertainty grew. He felt his stomach knot up as if he had told yet another lie—a bad habit he tried to curb—and it was coming back to haunt him.

The possibility that it was his house on fire forced a sharp breath. In an adrenaline rush, Bing pedaled faster. His thoughts muddied as the smoke became denser and darker, more potent, and surrounded him like a blanket. He coughed again and again. As he rounded the familiar corner of the road where a lightning bolt had split a huge Ponderosa tree in two, the road also broke. The left path led to his house; the right track resulted in the Smith’s home.

At once, Bing knew the awful truth. The thick, dark smoke wasn’t coming from the Smith’s house at all. It was denser than before and coming from the direction of his house. He couldn’t pedal any faster. Every meter brought him into thicker smoke. His ready, determined gaze focused on the graveled road before him. His eyes stung and watered; he coughed more frequently.

Mom! Dad! Molly!

Bing rounded the last gravel bend leading to his house. There were no flashing lights from a fire truck or the headlights of a tanker truck. Nor did he see any vehicle tracks ahead of him or hear any sounds of water gushing from fire hoses. And he didn’t hear Vince Wilkinson, the fire chief, loudly ordering his firefighters to do this and do that. Instead, he heard the awful, sinister sounds of wood cracking from advancing flames and hot water, hissing like angry snakes as it turned into steam from superheated pipes.

He braked suddenly, stopped and stood still as a stump.

The house was burning like a huge torch! Massive red, blue, and white flames leaped from every wall and the roof. The fire consumed everything he had ever known, had ever loved, and bound him with cruel fascination. Where forbidding flames ended, coal black smoke began. As he’d seen from a distance, some of it curled menacingly back to the ground but most of it blackened the sky as far as he could see. He forced holding his breath. Tears drained uncontrollably from his eyes.

What had been a Jeep Cherokee was in the driveway under the fallen, flaming carport. Since it was the household’s only car, it meant that his family was somewhere nearby. The interior and the tires of the car had already burned, and black, smoky flames crawled fast up the body of the vehicle where paint had melted off. The heat from the fire was so intense, Bing could barely tolerate being so near.

He backed away from the flaming car in case its gas tank exploded, and he put his arm in front of his face for protection. The smoke in his lungs made them ache. The blaze had already consumed the house. There looked to be no hope of saving anything. The outreaching flames had also caught hold of the grass and sawdust and entered the nearby forest. The fire had crept up dry bushes and into the lower branches of the Ponderosa pine and fir trees. All his dad’s carved bears, finished and unfinished, burned like huge, thick candles. Bing couldn’t speak; he could barely think.

Then there was the forbidding, revolting smell—like nothing he’d ever known. It wasn’t like the burning of hay, bushes, or trees in a forest. It wasn’t like combustion of polyester or wool, which his dad said could be lethal. It had a distinct signature; an oily, sulfuric odor stung his eyes. More uncontrollable tears drained as he looked around for his family.

They must have gotten away on foot before the fire started, he reasoned. They must be somewhere nearby. He decided that since the Jeep was there, they had made their way through the forest to the Smith’s house. Ahhh! How could dad let our house burn down? He’s a fireman, for Pete’s sake!

Bing couldn’t hold his breath any longer. It exploded out of him, and he inhaled the toxic smoke. He coughed violently. His eyes were filled with smoke, and he cried harder.

Have to leave—sure death here. Maybe the river—no—Jim’s place.

The teenager frantically turned his bicycle around. The more he rubbed his fingers in his eyes, the worse was the stinging. He got back on the seat and headed as fast as he could back up the road. Tears of irritation and remorse streamed down his face when he turned onto the fork of the path leading to the Smith’s house.

The sight of the fire filled his mind, along with the sudden loss. Everything he ever owned was in that inferno. All his mementos, his baseball cards and comic books, the Nintendo stuff he’d worked so hard for, his schoolwork, all his clothes, and his awards—destroyed.

Everything, everything’s gone! He gasped. Oh, no! Molly’s doll collection! He poured on more speed.

As Bing pedaled farther from the fire, he tried to focus on anything positive—like his small family standing on the Smith’s porch with Jim and Karen. Why wasn’t Dad here fighting the fire with the other volunteers? And where are the volunteers? They should have made an effort. It was our house. We’re at all the other house fires. He wiped away more of the stinging tears.

His legs were as tired as his eyes and lungs. He’d almost made it to the Smith house when he hit a rock in the road, swerved uncontrollably toward the forest, across Oregon grapeberries, and glanced off the base of a thick Ponderosa tree. What a fast deer hadn’t been able to do, a large tree accomplished. Bing crashed, falling off his mountain bike. For the first time, he realized he was exhausted. Smoke and ash finely coated his entire body.

He’d ridden all the way from town, a distance of ten kilometers, much of it at his fastest speed. He lay in a heap on pine needles at the base of the tree, gasping for air. It took a few seconds for him to regain his bearings.

He looked around in the thickening smoke to make sure he was going the right direction. Then he managed to stand up and press on to the front porch of the Smith’s big log house. No one was on the front porch as he’d envisioned. He went to the front door and pushed on the latch of the big brass handle. It was hard locked and didn’t budge. He pounded on the thick oak door, but no one came to answer. He tapped hard on the picture window. Again, no one came. The drapes were drawn shut, so that he couldn’t see inside.

No one seemed to be home at all. When the fog in his mind cleared, Bing remembered his father mentioning that Jim and Karen would be taking a trip to the Bahamas. He hadn’t seen them for a couple of weeks. His thoughts were flying in ten directions at once.

But then where is my family? Why is the car flaming in the carport? What started the fire? Questions needing answers came fast and furious.

The smoke surrounding the Smith’s house thickened. Bing considered that if the volunteer fire department didn’t arrive soon, the forest between his house and the Smith’s would be ablaze, and then the fire might consume their house, also—a double disaster. Who knew where it would spread beyond that? There wasn’t another neighbor within several hectares. The forest extended in all directions, around nearly everyone’s house in the Met-how Valley.

What should I do? Bing frantically decided to break into the house and dial 911. He didn’t want to destroy the big, expensive picture window near the door. Instead, the boy went around the building to the smallest bedroom window. He found a rock and threw it; the window shattered. He cleaned up the jagged glass edges around the window. Now he wouldn’t lacerate himself when he climbed through.

His minimal tumbling training paid off as he hoisted himself to the windowsill and rolled through the opening. When he hit the bedroom floor, a piece of glass cut his shoulder; it started to bleed a little. The smoke-free air inside the room provided relief for his aching lungs, and he was able to stop coughing.

Rising off the floor, Bing thought about what to do next, deciding to go directly to the living room where he knew there was a telephone, the one he had used so many times to call home. There it was on the familiar oak end table at the end of the red leather couch where he had often sat, discussing things with Jim and Karen, his mock grandparents. His spirits rose a little. He picked up the receiver. He couldn’t believe it. The line was dead. There was no dial tone.

Blast! What else can I do? Bing went from window to window to see if the fire had reached the boundaries of the Smith’s property. When he saw only smoke, he was relieved although a deep, overwhelming depression settled over him. Bing sank onto the couch and began to cry into the cushions. He cried long and hard. When he ran out of tears, he fell fast asleep. A dynamite blast might not have awakened him.

As a result, Bing missed the eventual arrival of the volunteer fire department at his house. The place was already a mass of smoldering embers. They put out what was still burning.

Peter Brown was not among the dozen firefighters. In the burned debris in the basement, flooded over by several feet of water, the horrified volunteers found three charred bodies. One was small; the other two were adults. They were tightly wrapped around that of the child as if protecting her from heat and falling debris.

Vince Wilkinson, the fire chief, determined that the corpses were the bodies of his friend, Peter, Peter’s wife, Linda, and their youngest child, Molly. With a heavy heart, Vince, and Carl, another volunteer, placed the family’s charred corpses in thick, black rubber body bags. These were loaded into an ambulance and driven away to be examined by the county coroner.

While the fire chief and Carl were attending to the bodies, other firefighters attacked the spreading fire in the forest. They doused it with water before it reached the front steps of the Smith house. Jim Smith had sent a letter to Wilkinson, informing him that he and his wife were on vacation.

The firefighters were preoccupied with fighting the fire, and did not see the broken bedroom window, and, therefore, did not tell their boss about it, and, as a consequence, no one entered the house, where they would have found the other Brown child passed out on the living room couch.

Vince was deeply distressed that his right-hand man and his family were dead. An ex-military man with an explosives background, Wilkinson made a preliminary determination of the cause of the fire from clues left by the burning wood and metal. He wrote in his report:

Napalm or something akin to it must have been the agent that started the blaze. The fire began all at once, trapping the three Browns inside with no means of escape.

The fire chief later reported to his men that it was as if someone had spread napalm around the perimeter of the building and then had simultaneously ignited the substance all around, creating a powerful, lethal conflagration.

After going back again and again to the fire site, Wilkinson finished his report. It included his determination of arson and the fact that the body of Bing Brown, the teenage son of Linda and Peter, had not been found in the ashes. Also in bold letters, Wilkinson wrote that he suspected Bing Brown, known to be a wild kid, with a particular interest in fire, of being the arsonist. Where they boy might have obtained napalm, or some compound like it, a tightly guarded substance used exclusively by the military and terrorists, Wilkinson admitted, was a complete mystery.

Bing learned none of this that day. When he woke up, nearly twenty-eight hours later, he couldn’t believe that he was so hungry. The sleepy-head had no way of knowing that because his body needed repair, he had slept a full day and night; it was something he had never done.

Searching around, Bing found cookies in a cupboard and washed them down with a glass of water. He wanted something more filling. However, the refrigerator and freezer compartments had been cleaned out. Everything in the cupboards needed some preparation or a can opener and the electricity had been shut off.

Canned creamed corn in the cupboard looked promising, but Bing decided he didn’t have the time to open it with the cutter in his Swiss Army pocketknife.

Drats! Where’s their hand can opener? Try as he might, looking through drawer after kitchen drawer, he couldn’t locate it. Neither would the can fit into a pants pocket. Finally, he gave up. Besides, he desperately needed to find his family and tell them about the fire.

Exasperated, he made another firm decision. I’ll go to Jeff’s house and get something to eat. I’ll call around for my parents from there.

Bing unlocked the front door and was amazed to discover that the smoke had cleared; he could breathe without difficulty. There was no residual smoke plume in the sky, either. It puzzled him so much, he decided to go back to the site where his house had previously been. Maybe my family will be there now.

He found his mountain bike in the bushes near the Ponderosa tree and righted it, dusting off the seat. He made a quick determination that the wheel spokes were all straight, and slowly rode to where a house had stood since before he was born.

Arriving at was once home, he noticed the ground saturated with water. This time, he saw tire tracks, recognizing them as belonging to the two Winthrop fire trucks. He immediately realized that the volunteers had been there and put out the inferno. He had missed the opportunity to share the latest experience with his father, to watch him put out another fire, this time, their own. He had hoped that learning how to extinguish fires might lead to valuable experience in getting him a real job outside the Met-how Valley. Already Bing had determined to leave after graduating from high school when he was seventeen, an ambition shared by most of his friends. His hardy sense of adventure was already urging him to prepare.

He viewed the rest of the fire scene. Nearly everything was gone but the four pillars that had held up the front porch, a bit of a rear corner wall, and the chimney. Small, wispy smoke trails were rising from the remnants of his father’s chainsaw sculptures. Otherwise, the fire had been expertly doused.

Bing cautiously walked around the area where the house had stood. Pointed, bent pieces of metal were protruding everywhere. Nails were poking out of dark, warped metal corner and stud braces. Nearly nothing else was left.

Then, something did catch his sharp eyes; it was about the size of the palm of his hand and it lay amongst the water-soaked ashes. He could have easily overlooked it since it was about the same color as everything remaining—an ash gray-green. Picking it up, he realized it was the strange, round object he had bought at a yard sale only a week before. Because it looked like the only thing he would be saving from the fire, he brushed the ashes from it and placed it in his pants right front pocket beside his pocket knife. The fire-saved article was still a bit warm; it felt good on his leg.

Bing walked around and around the burned-out site, trying to find anything else not burned to a crisp. After a few minutes, he determined that there was nothing else to find. The flames had disintegrated nearly everything. Looking for anything more, he decided was a foolish waste of time, considering what else he needed to do.

The sun was nearer the horizon than it had been earlier, suggesting to Bing that the time must be nearly four o’ clock in the afternoon.

I must have slept three or four hours. I just can’t believe the firefighters were so slow getting here.

Thinking about the fire department gave him another idea about where to find his father. The volunteers were always getting ready. After a fire, his dad would be at the fire hall, helping to dry all ten of the ten-meter-long lengths of water hoses, a necessary ritual to keep them in decent shape for fighting the next fire. It took hours to drain the water from them, place them on the drying racks, and put the previously dried, hoses back on the fire truck.

The teenager knew that the trip back to town would take nearly half an hour as most of the road he needed to travel was uphill. He had cycled the same route since he had received his first bicycle at age twelve. He couldn’t remember how many times he had cycled to Winthrop and then another fifteen kilometers south to the next larger town—Twisp. Mid-distant between the two villages was his school. In any season but winter, bus drivers wouldn’t allow him to ride because he was so rowdy and had broken so many of the drivers’ rules. Being mischievous had gained him nothing but a terrible reputation throughout the Met-how Valley.

Bing set out, determined to find his dad, and through him, his mom and sister. Imagining that the rest of his life was in shambles, his family was immensely important to him right now. He had a sharp sense of purpose even though an empty, despairing feeling overtook him.

CHAPTER TWO

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A MOMENTOUS MEETING

E very life has a purpose. No purpose is necessarily more important than any other. But your duty is to find that purpose, and then try to the best of your ability to fulfill it. Peter Brown’s advice was still ringing in his son’s ears as Bing was riding his bicycle back from his demolished house to the fire station in town. Lately, he had grown to suspect that some words and some events spring to life when one is least expecting them.

Bing had been wondering what his purpose in life would be. Considering that he had fought some fires and caught an arsonist, Bing suspected it might have something to do with firefighting. He knew his father’s purpose—it was to bring home the proverbial bacon for their small family. His mother’s purpose was to raise the children and create a more beautiful world through her paintings and weavings.

But Bing had only one true focus in his life right now: to find his precious family. They had become especially important since recently, he had been expelled from the town’s junior high school for engaging in knock-down, drag-out fights with other male students. As a result, his father and mother were doing their best to home school him.

The cadence of his pedaling brought another of his father’s lessons to mind. It had to do with one’s talents. His dad had stressed that a person ought to always be self-renewing. He should be learning throughout his life, and not remain static either in one job or in one frame of mind. He had borrowed a quote from John Gardner, a famous writer, and had made Bing memorize it, hoping his son, would take it to heart.

Right now, as Bing was fast pedaling, the quote burst forth from his memory. For the self-renewing person, the development of his or her own potentials and the process of self-discovery never ends. It is a sad but unarguable fact that most human beings go through their lives only partially aware of the full range of their abilities.

After thinking about the quote for about a minute, the cadence of his pedaling brought three more precious words to the forefront of his mind.

Mom— Dad— Molly— Mom— Dad— Molly— Mom— Dad—Molly—

Bing had pedaled five kilometers; he was halfway to town. Only a few cars had passed him on the two-lane country road. He thought about getting off his bicycle and flagging the next one down, dismissing the idea because he didn’t want to part with his bike, which he might need if he didn’t find his dad at the fire station.

As he was coasting along a slight downhill grade, something small and black came hurtling across the newly troubled blue sky with lance-like speed. A pinprick of dark light, at first, it became larger and larger, transforming quickly into what looked like a round, black meteor.

As it happened, one of the subjects Bing had been studying during his home schooling sessions was Astronomy, so he knew the odds of a meteor hitting the Earth were exceedingly rare. The chance of seeing a meteor in broad daylight was almost non-existent. Still, it did not surprise him until he realized that the celestial object seemed to be coming straight at him.

He cranked on more speed. It was still over four kilometers of pavement between him and town. Bing’s mind took flight, thinking terrible thoughts, flashing back to a time when a lightning bolt had nearly cremated a friend as he had trudged from a storm-induced Florida surf. Only seconds before, George had been complaining about the rotten surfing conditions.

As it happens there, the weather had quickly changed. A storm was blowing in. George took his surfboard into the fast developing waves. After a couple of good rides, he had guided his board back to the beach. Even bigger waves were building, however, and George was standing on the beach, board under his arm, deciding whether to go out or not. He laid the board at his feet to study the situation.

Bing beckoned George to give it up and not be so thick-headed. Man, it’s way too dangerous out here! Don’t you remember what your dad said? Don’t surf during storms. You could get zapped!

Bing had been only two meters from George when a blindingly thick lightning bolt had skewered his friend head to foot, grounding itself in the beach sand. George had suddenly looked pale and lifeless and then fell over as stiff as his board. His companion screamed and went running for help. Bing had seen first hand that lightning was unpredictable, and he realized it could just as easily have hit him.

At this meteor moment, Bing felt as he had felt then—awestruck, desperate to get out of the path of danger. He jammed the gears of his bicycle into a lower notch, trying to force more speed.

RIDE! RIDE! he screamed, nursing fright. His nerves were jangled and adrenaline coursed through every vein; he couldn’t pedal any faster. He looked back. The thing was still seemingly aiming for him; it seemed to have changed course to follow him.

Frantically, he thought, Being hit by that could kill me.

At the same time, the sky was turning increasingly gray, making the nearby cottonwood and Aspen leaves seem more vividly golden; they were quivering like spent silver dollars in the quickening breeze. But Bing was not concentrating on the natural beauty; he was frantically pedaling to get to Winthrop.

The air took on a crisp bite as the early fall sun disappeared beyond a suddenly appearing cloud. Other clouds were also forming, but not blowing in from the west as they normally did. Nor could Bing Brown appreciate them. These clouds seemed to be evolving from sheer nothingness. Electricity in the air made his long hair stand partly on end. He was so scared, and pedaling so fast, he was stove hot despite not wearing a coat, and yet he was thankful for the blue jeans and heavier tennis shoes he had decided to wear.

The object kept coming; straight at him. Oddly, it appeared to be moving at a slower speed than it had been before. His mind flashed on the prospect of the meteor hitting him. What would it do? Splash me all over the pavement? Bury me? He glanced over his right shoulder. Thoughts flashed like quicksilver. Sweat started pouring through his plaid flannel shirt.

Lightning bolts began emanating from the clouds. Strangely silent, they immediately grabbed the bicycler’s attention.

Now lightning— YIKES!

He was tiring rapidly. Forced to come up with an idea, he thought rapidly. What if I stop? Won’t it overshoot me at the angle it’s coming down?

He went for it and braked expertly, turning his bike in a perfect half circle. Now he was facing the flying object, straddling his bicycle. The meteor changed course,