Back to the Future (18 page)

“This is gonna be a tough day for me all around,” George said finally.

 “How so?”

“Well, first there was my chickening out with Lorraine—”

“I wouldn’t say you chickened out,” Marty soothed. “It was more a matter of—”

“No, I chickened out,” George retorted, a hint of real anger in his voice. “I really wanted to rush over and ask Lorraine for a date. And then when Biff was pawing her, I wanted to run over and sock him on the jaw. But I chickened out in both cases. I couldn’t move.”

Marty didn’t answer. In fact, he couldn’t think of a comforting thing to say.

“And now I gotta talk to Dad about college,” George continued.

“What’s so awful about that?”

“He’ll say it’s no good. You know, give me all the reasons why I shouldn’t go. And I’ll believe him and end up not going.”

“Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me,” Marty observed.

“What?”

“You oughta stand up for what you believe in. What do you want to major in at college?”

George’s eyes shone as he spoke. “I’d kind of like to study writing or journalism. Writing those stories is about the most fun I have. If I could learn to make a living doing something like that…”

“Then tell your father that.”

“Oh, no. He’d laugh if I mentioned the stories. The idea of college is terrible enough.”

“Well, anyway,” Marty urged, “you gotta fight. Stand up to him.”

“I will,” George replied. “This is important to my future so I’ll do it.”

They soon arrived at the house with a placard hanging from the porch. It read
THE MCFLYS
. A bit tacky for 1985 but probably chic for 1955, Marty thought.

Arthur McFly was outside waxing the car. He waved his rag as the boys approached.

“Go and talk to him right away,” Marty urged.

“About what?”

“About college.”

“I’ll get to that. I’ve gotta introduce you first.”

“No,” Marty said, stopping at the edge of the sidewalk. “I’m not moving until you talk to him about college.”

“Sure…” George said hesitantly.

He walked over to his father, looked back over his shoulder at Marty. In order to make him feel more secure, Marty meandered toward the porch of the house so that he was out of George’s line of vision. He was actually closer around the corner of the house, however, and could hear the conversation quite clearly.

“Who’s your friend?” Arthur McFly asked.

“A new guy from school,” George replied. “Listen, Dad, I have an important decision to make and, well, I really need some advice.”

Only a C-plus beginning, Marty thought, although the bit about needing advice was probably good psychologically.

“Gee, son, I’m kinda busy here,” George’s father said. “Couldn’t it wait a few days?”

“Not really,” George replied. “You see, I’ve filled out an application for college and the deadline for sending it in is midnight tonight. I can’t decide whether I should send it in.”

Wrong, Marty thought, that makes it sound so wishywashy.

“Well, if you want my advice,” George’s father said, “I’d say no. College is hard, son. And there’s a lot of competition to get in. You’d be competing with the smartest kids in the state. Why would you want to put yourself through that kind of aggravation?”

“Well, I might get in,” George responded. The tone of his voice, however, was not brimming with confidence. “Son, you’re a longshot,” Arthur McFly said. “And most of the time longshots don’t work out. The chances of you getting into college are mighty slim.”

“Why?” George asked.

What a miserable counterpuncher you are, Marty fumed. Tell him you can do it.

“Why, son? Because you’ve never done anything like that before. You’re just kinda average. Now if you send this application in and get all excited about it, what’s gonna happen when they turn you down? I’ll tell you what: you’ll mope around the house, feeling rejected, and maybe your marks at school will suffer. If you want to know what I think, I suggest you go about your business and forget this whole thing.”

Instead of fighting back, George waited a long moment and then nodded. “Yeah, Dad, that makes sense,” Marty heard him say. “Thanks.”

It was too much for Marty. He sighed, put his head in his hands.

Meanwhile, Arthur McFly put the finishing touches to George’s ambitions with a rationale for failure disguised as homespun philosophy. “When you get to be my age, son,” he said, “you’ll realize that certain things just aren’t meant to be.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right,” George murmured. Marty started to walk away.

“What do you think of the car, son?” he heard Arthur McFly say.

“Looks pretty good, eh?”

“Looks real good, Dad…”

Simultaneously, a crack of thunder split the afternoon quiet and rain began to pour down. Marty broke into a fast trot.

“Good,” he said as he ran. “I hope the rain spoils his wax job.”

He was soaked by the time he arrived at Doc Brown’s garage laboratory but, underneath, Marty was still seething at the thought of George’s weakness. Doc had the Twin Pines Mall videotape running and was working on modifications to the DeLorean as Marty entered.

“How’d it go?” he asked, not looking up from his work.

“Terrible,” Marty sighed. “He’s just the same as when I knew him. A Milquetoast. He makes up his mind to do one thing and then gets talked out of it. But at least I’m starting to find out why.”

“Why the kid’s got no self-confidence?”

“Yeah. No wonder he won’t ask my mom out, or any girl for that matter. All he ever hears from my grandfather is that he’s going to fail. No one ever tells him he can succeed at anything…”

“A familiar tale,” Doc Brown philosophized.

“Jeez,” Marty said, “if he got that kind of support from Grandpa, no wonder Dad gave me such rotten advice.”

Doc Brown looked up for the first time. “In my own vast years of experience,” he remarked, “I’ve made it a principle never to take advice from anyone—particularly if that someone is older than I am.”

“Hey, Doc, that’s good advice,” Marty smiled.

“Thank you. Now take my advice and don’t take it,” he laughed.

“Not even from you, huh?”

“Actually, I may be the exception in your case. In the future—or in the past—if you ever need anything, need to talk to anybody, I’ll always be there for you.”

“Yeah, Doc. That’s great.”

The words were barely out when a sudden look of panic crossed Marty’s face. Glancing at the TV monitor, he realized that the dramatic climax of the Twin Pines episode was about to unfold. Already the black van was in the picture.

“It’s them,” Doc Brown was saying on the tape.

“Who?” Marty’s off-camera voice yelled back.

“They found me,” Doc Brown continued. “I don’t know how but they found me.”

The tape ended abruptly. Marty, remembering what happened after that on that dark night in 1985, felt his body shiver with pain.

He looked at the Doc Brown of 1955, who had poked his head back into the DeLorean. “Doc,” he said haltingly, “there’s something I haven’t told you about what happens…on the night we make that tape…”

Doc Brown looked up. “Fascinating device, that camera,” he said matter-of-factly. “I can’t believe it’s made in Japan.”

“Doc,” Marty continued. “There’s something I haven’t told you about what happens…on the night we made that tape…”

He didn’t know why, but he felt that he ought to warn his friend about the terrorists. Perhaps it was the violent way he died; no one should be forced to go that way if it’s possible to prevent it.

But Doc Brown was already holding up his hand.

“Please, Marty,” he said, “don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to take any more chances of screwing up the space-time continuum. No man should know too much about his own destiny. If I know too much about the future, I could endanger my own existence, just like you’ve endangered yours.”

“Yeah,” Marty said. “Maybe you’re right.”

There was certainly a great deal of logic to what the man said. This way, if Marty said nothing, Doc Brown at least had thirty years to live. Being told that, however, might make him so careless he would endanger himself and possibly even die earlier. So Doc’s rule about not screwing around with the space-time continuum seemed to make a lot of sense. Pondering it and his own situation, Marty withdrew his wallet and again took out the family picture.

“Good God,” he whispered.

The image of his brother Dave was almost completely gone. Only his feet could be seen in the photo.

Doc Brown was studying him. “Bad, huh?” he said.

Marty nodded.

“That’s nature’s way of saying, get your ass moving,” Doc said. “I guess seeing your brother fade away like that must be pretty scary.”

“Tell me about it,” Marty grimaced. “I feel like I’m in an episode of the
Twilight Zone.”

“Twilight Zone?” Brown repeated. “That’s an interesting phraseology. It’s a perfect description of where you are, as a matter of fact…in a zone of twilight, neither here nor there…a middle ground, between light and shadow, between things and ideas…”

“Yeah, I know,” Marty said. ‘“There’s the signpost up ahead…You’ve just crossed over—”

“If you get back, maybe you could make a movie out of this,” Doc Brown smiled.

“Good idea. But what do you mean, if?”

“Things happen. I might mess up the time machine so that the lightning doesn’t work. You might not be able to get your parents together before the end of the week. By that time, maybe your head will be missing from the family portrait…”

“Oh, God…” Marty moaned.

He sat down heavily on the lumpy old sofa Doc kept in his garage. It was half-filled now with old magazines, mail, and circulars. On the top of the pile was a newspaper, dated November 7, 1955. An article on the back page leaped out at Marty. It read:
LOCAL FARMER CLAIMS ‘SPACE ZOMBIE’ WRECKED HIS BARN
, and below that, in smaller type: “Otis Peabody Under Observation at County Asylum.”

“Eureka!” Marty suddenly shouted, snapping his fingers.

Doc Brown’s head popped out of the DeLorean.

“You thought of something?”

“You said it! I know how to get my old man to ask Mom to that dance.”

“How?”

“I’m gonna scare the shit out of him.”

George McFly went to bed early, yielding to an overall mood of depression generated by events in school and his father’s lack of enthusiasm for a college career. Although the phrase “positive thinking” was not popular as such in 1955, he had read books that promoted a variation of the same philosophy. A year earlier, he had pinned his hopes on the prewar best-seller,
How to Win Friends and Influence People
, had memorized whole sections of it and tried to carve out a new life based on this sunny-side-up attitude. The first time he encountered Biff Tannen had negated all his efforts. According to Dale Carnegie, the book’s author, a man cannot remain hostile to you if you show him you’re sincerely interested in him. Biff Tannen had not only remained hostile, he had rubbed a hero sandwich in George’s face after George spent nearly a quarter hour testing his new philosophy on him.

Girls proved no more malleable. Approaching them with a new positive attitude caused them to regard George McFly not only as a creep, but also as an insincere creep. Even his parents avoided George during the time he was under the sway of Mr. Carnegie, instinctively distrusting his strangely outgoing disposition.

And so George had retreated into himself again. “The hell with it,” he said. “Let those who like me like me for what I am.” It sounded good to say this, except that he couldn’t say for sure who it was that liked him.

Retiring to his room at nine o’clock, he had written several more pages of his earth invasion story, fooled with his homework for an hour or so and then turned out the light. He did not fall asleep easily, but by one o’clock had drifted into a semiconscious state that led, a half hour later, to deep slumber.

He did not see the large form move to the side of his bed, nor did he feel the featherweight headphones being placed on his ears by the gloved hands. The same hands inserted a cassette tape into the Walkman tape player, a cassette labeled
VAN HALEN
. The dial of the Walkman was moved to “10” and the “play” button pushed.

George passed from peaceful sleep to a state of pulse-pounding agitation in less than a second. What was that sound? It was the worst noise he had ever heard—the torturing of humans, perhaps, mixed with background sounds from hell. Yet it had a terrifying throb that elevated it from the realm of noise to semi-intelligent creation. But it was the creation of mad people, the synchronized babble of idiots screaming, lemming-like, at the top of their lungs. What was going on? Had he died and was now approaching the gates of hell?

Then, suddenly, the sound was gone.

“Silence, earthling!” a voice intoned.

George, who was sufficiently frightened to be incapable of any sound, could only stare at the creature near the foot of his bed. It was yellow, featureless, with only a square mouth through which it spoke to him in an eerie filtered voice.

He had no doubt it was a creature from another planet.

“Who…” George managed to squeak.

“My name is Darth Vader,” the being intoned. “I am an extraterrestrial from the planet Vulcan.”

George shook his head. “I must…be…dreaming…” he stammered.

“This is no dream!” the alien shot back. “You are having a close encounter of the third kind. You have taken one step beyond into the outer limits of the twilight zone.”

“No…”

“Silence! I have instructions for you.”

“I…don’t want…instructions…” George moaned. “Mom…Dad…”

The creature reached into his belt and withdrew something that looked extremely lethal. It was made of one solid piece of hard shiny material with a round hole, about two inches in diameter at the end. From a distance of six feet, George could plainly hear its low hum and feel heat radiating from its nozzle.