Back to the Future (26 page)

“Damn!” he yelled. “Where the hell are you?”

Oblivious to the branches tearing his skin, he continued to tear into the pile. Doc Brown, meanwhile, raced up the courthouse stairs like a madman, taking the rough-hewn steps of the ancient belfry three at a time. Arriving at the clock tower room which opened to the ledge directly below the clock, he saw pigeons scatter as he invaded their inner sanctum of safety. His hair blowing wildly in the wind and his rough features illuminated by flashes of lightning, Doc Brown truly resembled the stereotypical mad scientist on a mission that would shake the world.

He looked up, saw that the connecting socket was dangling on its cable between the
1
and
2
of the huge clock face. The other end was still attached to the lightning rod on the tower above.

Looking down, he saw Marty, five stories below, waving the paddle plug which he had just located.

“Good!” Doc Brown shouted.

He tossed down the rope, which uncoiled to land a few feet in front of Marty. The young man grabbed it, tied the end to the paddle plug, then waved to Doc Brown.

Doc nodded and began hauling the rope with the cable attached back into the tower. As he continued the handover-hand operation, he saw Marty’s mouth working and heard partial words.

“What?” he yelled down.

Marty cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted as loudly as he could. “I gotta tell you about the future, Doc! Please listen to me!”

The words were lost amid a new rush of wind which nearly tore the rope from Doc’s grasp.

“Can’t hear you!” Doc shouted back.

“The future!” Marty yelled. “On the night I travel back in time, the terrorists show up and get you—”

“Terror—what?”

“Terrorists! They—”

Bong! Bong!!

The clock began to toll ten o’clock. Kicking angrily at the ground, Marty waited, knowing he hadn’t a prayer of being heard.

With the huge bells tolling so close, Doc Brown nearly lost his balance. He quickly regained his footing, however, and was able to haul the rope the rest of the way. Grabbing the paddle plug, he looked down at Marty and gestured that he should get in the car and go.

On the ground, Marty hesitated. He knew what Doc Brown meant and understood the urgency of the situation. Still, he wanted one more shot at telling his friend what was in store for him if he wasn’t careful. He looked up. Doc Brown gestured wildly toward the DeLorean, then at his watch.

Marty sighed, turned and raced back toward the car. “Run, boy, run!” Doc Brown shouted from the clock tower. Seeing Marty do so, he untied the rope from the end of the paddle plug and looked at its socket mate dangling against the face of the clock. It was a good stretch away. Reaching for it, he realized he’d have to go out on the ledge to make the connection.

As he lifted himself cautiously onto the narrow ledge, Doc saw the DeLorean start up and move down the street. “Good,” he whispered. “Now all I have to do is make sure he’s not barreling down the street for nothing.” Creeping along the ledge, his hands flat against the wall with the nails gripping as tightly as possible, Doc tried to think of anything but the wind and distinct possibility of falling. Blasts of lightning cast weird shadows and outlines on the clock tower wall and each roll of thunder caused the building to shudder.

“I’ll be alive in 1985,” he said, realizing even as he said it that he was whistling past the graveyard. “I’ll be alive in ’85—so I’m safe now.”

The words came out but he knew they were fallacious. His being alive in 1985 was predicated on his not climbing clock towers in 1955.

“Well,” he gasped. “Let’s just get it done.”

Leaning into the wind, he reached for the dangling cable, felt it slip through his fingers, took a deep breath and reached out again.

*    *    *

Marty pulled up to the “starting line” Doc Brown had arranged for him, made a U-turn and sat in the idling DeLorean, his eyes fixed hypnotically on the alarm clock next to him.

“Dammit, Doc,” he murmured. “Why’d you have to tear up that letter? If only there was a little more time for me to explain…”

As he considered the problem, he withdrew his gaze from the alarm clock and looked at the
DESTINATION TIME
and
LAST TIME DEPARTED
readouts, both of which were set for 1:31
A.M
.

“That’s it,” he said finally. “There’s no way I can have more time at this end, but why can’t I make time at the other end?”

With that, he began pushing the appropriate buttons on the
DESTINATION TIME
keypad so that it moved from 1:30 to 1:29 and even earlier. “Sure,” he murmured. “I’ll just show up in 1985 a few minutes before the terrorists shoot Doc and warn him then.”

He watched as the
DESTINATION TIME
readout changed from 1:26 to 1:24 and then paused, wondering if seven minutes was enough.

A moment later, the engine of the DeLorean shook twice and then died. Marty turned the key in the ignition but the car wouldn’t start.

“Come on, come on,” he growled. “Don’t tell me I came this far to run out of gas!”

Doc Brown, holding the loose cable in his left hand, took a small step along the ledge of the clock tower and had his foot poised to take another when he heard the sound. It was the crunch of rapidly disintegrating stone and he heard it a split second before he felt his body start to fall. Dropping the cable, he leaped forward to grab the only object between himself and the ground—the minute hand of the courthouse tower clock.

“Goddamn!” he yelled.

Even as he spoke, he felt something strike his left foot. Looking down, he saw that the cable was still hanging in midair, its end balanced precariously on the instep of his foot. For a long moment, Brown just hung there, the wind blowing his hair and lightning illuminating his terrorized features. Then, carefully moving his right foot toward the intact section of ledge, he moved his body toward safety, all the while trying to keep the cable balanced and ultimately reachable. When his right foot gained the ledge, he took a deep breath, hopped across and, at the same time, kicked the cable into the air so he could catch it with his left hand.

He thought the next part of his job—plugging the cable plug into the socket—would be easy. But when he tried putting them together, he discovered they were about a foot apart.

“How the hell did that happen?” he groaned.

Shaking his head, he peered downward into the alternating gloom and garishly lit scene below. The cause of his dilemma soon became apparent—a tree limb was caught on the cable, eliminating the slack necessary to get the two ends together. Jerking and whipping the end of the cable, he struggled to free it but was unsuccessful. In desperation, he increased the violence of his tugs, finally giving the cable a tremendous yank that pulled it free from the tree.

“Good!” he yelled, and then: “Damn it!”

The plug at the other end of the connection was now loose, leaving Brown with a useless plug in his hand.

Considering the utter despair he felt, Doc Brown’s reaction was comparatively mild. Clutching the side of the tower, he merely closed his eyes and tried not to think of anything for a moment. But even with his eyes closed, he could see the lightning crashing about him with increased ferocity and feel the thunder shake the courthouse. Forcing his mind to think, he asked himself: Is there any way I can get everything connected?

“Yes,” he whispered finally. “I’ll probably kill myself but what the hell?”

Tying the two loose cable ends together, he plugged them in, tested them to make sure they were tight, took a deep breath and jumped.

As he slid down the cable toward the ground, he felt his hands burn but held tight until his feet struck the solid earth. Then he was running with the cable toward the lamp post.

“Shit!”

Continuing to grind away at the ignition, Marty winced as he heard the alarm clock go off.

“Come on! Come on!” he shouted.

The ignition sputtered, coughed, and then—miraculously—caught.

Jamming his foot against the accelerator, Marty was thrown back in the seat as the DeLorean peeled out. Burning rubber, it hit forty within a half block and was approaching sixty-five as Town Square came into view. Staring straight ahead, Marty caught sight of the wire strung across the street and locked his vision on it. So intent was he that he failed to see the figure of Doc Brown as he raced toward the lamp post, cable in hand. Less than a second before a spectacular bolt of lightning struck, Doc plugged the cable in, spun around and fell backward. Glancing at his speedometer, Marty saw that the car was moving at eighty-eight miles an hour.

Then there was a terrific crash of simultaneous lightning and thunder. The landscape and buildings all around Marty went completely white, like the homes in the film about atomic bomb testing. My God, he thought, I’ve been nuked. A slight bump told him the trolley hook on the rear of the DeLorean had made contact with the cable. On the dash, dials flashed as the flux capacitor glowed and discharged. A dissonant rushing noise followed, the DeLorean kicked forward as if it had been thrust into orbit, and blackness descended.

From his prone position next to the lamp post, Doc Brown watched as the time machine made contact with the electrified cable. Rain continued to pour down but he didn’t notice it. Instead, he saw a montage of quick images—the glowing cable, lightning bolt striking the tower clock, the DeLorean seemingly enveloped by a yellow mist—which made him leap to his feet and let out an Indian war whoop. “We did it!” he shouted. “It was impossible but we did it!”

It was true. As if swallowed up by the earth or a giant hand from above, the DeLorean was gone. All that remained was the trolley pole, which had been wrenched free when the car passed under the cable. Now it dangled limply, buffeted by the rain and wind, the only souvenir of young Marty McFly’s sixty-year round trip backward and forward in time.

“Good luck,” Doc Brown breathed. “I’ll see you soon enough…I hope.”

The journey into the black tunnel slowed and finally ended. The car came to rest but the darkness continued to surround Marty, broken only by the glowing dials and readouts. Glancing down at them, he saw that
LAST TIME DEPARTED
read 11-5-1955, 10:04
P.M. PRESENT TIME
and
DESTINATION TIME
, which were the same, read 10-26-1985, 1:24
A.M.
That being the case, why the darkness? Marty thought of the scene in a movie he had seen about a time travel machine where the vehicle is enclosed in a mountain. Could that possibly have happened to him?

Gradually, as his eyes became used to the darkness, he realized that he was inside a building. Behind him was a circle of dim light.

“Well,” he murmured. “Looks like there’s no place to go but backwards.”

Slamming the car into reverse, he moved toward the light source. When he emerged into the night, he saw that his point of arrival had been the interior of the boarded-up Town Theatre. Everything else was as it became in 1985—the Studebaker dealership was now the Toyota place, the soda shop was gone, and the courthouse had thirty years of additional age on it.

“All right!” Marty shouted.

He reached down to turn on the car radio. A contemporary rock tune was playing. “All right!” he repeated.

Then he thought of Doc Brown. There would be time enough to celebrate later. Now he had to concentrate on saving his friend from a bloody and violent death.

He slammed the car into forward gear, felt the engine shudder and then die.

“Shit!” he yelled.

This time it was really dead. After grinding for a minute, Marty was unable to generate the slightest hint of renewed power. And as he continued to grind, he looked up and saw the familiar terrorist van cruising down the street and around a corner.

Horrified, he leaped from the car.

“The terrorists!” he yelled.

Then he was running, through Town Square and all the way down 2nd Street toward the mall. Arriving at the entrance, he noticed that it was called Lone Pine Mall and was decorated with the image of a single pine tree instead of two. Otherwise everything was the same. But the stalled DeLorean had cost him valuable time; the terrorist van was already on the parking lot, chasing Doc Brown while the lone figure of Marty McFly watched in horror.

Marty stood frozen, horrified and amazed. “Oh, no!” he gasped. “I’m too late!”

The scene blew his mind. There was Doc dying again while he looked on. Then, as the hail of bullets sent Brown falling to the ground, Marty saw himself leap into the DeLorean and race off. He had already experienced the scene once in the flesh but he watched again, fascinated by the replay seen from a different point of view.

Just as before, the terrorist van turned and pursued the DeLorean, which executed a neat U-turn and raced to the opposite end of the parking lot. It continued to accelerate even as it was shot at until being enveloped in a blinding white glow.

Losing control of their vehicle, the terrorist van driver was forced to swerve into a Fox Photo stand on the edge of the parking lot. The vehicle fell over and landed doorside down, trapping the terrorists inside. In the distance a police siren wailed.

“Jeez,” Marty whispered.

Suddenly remembering Doc Brown, he turned and ran toward the sprawled figure, still lying face down on .the asphalt. There were tears in Marty’s eyes as he turned his friend over.

“Doc…” he said softly. “Doc…please don’t be dead, Doc…”

“Well, all right, if you insist,” the apparently dead man replied, opening his eyes and smiling.

“You’re alive!” Marty shouted. 

“Of course I’m alive.”

“But you were shot—I saw it!” Marty cried. “I saw it twice!”

“On instant replay, as it were?” Doc smiled again. Marty nodded.

“The explanation is simple,” Brown said.

He ripped open his radiation suit to reveal a bulletproof vest.