Back to the Future (7 page)

“Is he all right?” Marty asked.

“He looks fine to me.”

Brown unbuckled the shoulder harness. Einstein bounded out of the car, playful and happy. Doc Brown reached into his pocket and gave him a milk bone as a reward. “A small price to pay for such invaluable research,” he said. “You’re sure he’s O.K.?”

“Yes,” Brown replied. “And he’s completely unaware that anything happened. As far as he’s concerned, the trip was instantaneous. That’s why his watch is a minute behind mine. He ‘skipped over’ that minute to instantly arrive at this minute in time…”

Seeing Marty’s frown, Doc Brown indicated that he should move closer to the DeLorean. “Come here, let me show you how it works,” he offered, sticking his own head into the cockpit of the car.

Marty edged closer, looked inside at the still-blinking array of dials and gadgets.

Like a kid showing off a new toy, Doc Brown began to flip switches and talk at the same time. “First you turn the time circuits on,” he said. A colorful battery of indicator lights went on inside as he pushed a button.

“This readout tells you where you’re going, this one tells you where you are, and this one tells you where you were,” he continued.

Marty looked at the readouts closely. They were labeled
DESTINATION TIME
,
PRESENT TIME
, and
LAST TIME DEPARTED
.

Without waiting to find out if Marty had any questions, Brown went on at a rapid pace. “You input your destination time on this keyboard,” he said. “Want to see the signing of the Declaration of Independence?”

Marty stared blankly, his mind abuzz. Was he kidding? Could this machine, however sophisticated, perform such miracles?

Again without waiting for an answer, Doc Brown punched up a date on the destination time board: 7-4-1776. “Then all we have to do is head for Philadelphia. Or perhaps you’d care to witness the birth of Christ.”

With that, he changed the dial to read 12-25-0.

“Of course,” he added didactically, “there’s some dispute about that date. Some scholars say Christ was born in the year 4
B.C.
and that somebody made a mistake in what year it was during the Dark Ages. But assuming 12-25-0 is correct, all we’d have to do is find our way to Bethlehem.”

“No sweat,” Marty said.

Now quite caught up in describing the mechanics of his system, Doc Brown changed the
DESTINATION TIME
to 11-5-1955. “Now here’s another red-letter date in the history of science and progress,” he went on. “November 5, 1955. I believe it was a Saturday. Yes, now that I think about it, I’m sure it was. The weather was kind of grey.”

“What happened then?” Marty asked. That was more than a decade before he had been born, so he could only speculate. “Was that the Salk vaccine or something like that?” he asked, remembering from science class that the polio cure went back to about that time.

“No,” Doc Brown went on. “It’s a red-letter date in science that nobody knows about—yet. Nobody except me, that is. You see, that was the day I invented time travel—”

“Then what’s today?” Marty interrupted.

“Today is the carrying-out, the execution,” Brown smiled. “November 5, 1955 was the conception, the moment when it all came together as a theory that I knew could work.” He leaned against the shiny frame of the DeLorean, his eyes misted in happy nostalgia. “I remember it vividly,” he said. “I was standing on the edge of my toilet, hanging a clock. The porcelain was wet. I slipped and hit my head on the sink to my left. And when I came to, I had a revelation—a vision that was absolutely perfect—a picture in my head of everything I needed to do and how I could do it.”

He gestured to the car. “Believe it or not, I saw this,” he continued. “My dream or hallucination or whatever it was contained a picture of this.”

“Amazing,” Marty said, his eyes wide with sincerity. He knew the feeling. Once he had awakened during the middle of the night with the lyrics and melody of a new song literally playing inside his head. All that he had to do was find paper and take dictation. That was small potatoes compared to a scientific breakthrough such as the invention of time travel, but the emotional impact was similar.

Leaning inside the DeLorean, Doc Brown pointed to a particular centerpiece unit. “Get a picture of this on tape,” he said.

Marty pointed the camera at the strange-looking object.

Moving his head next to it so that he could be on camera and describe its workings at the same time, Doc Brown continued in his professional tone. “This is what makes time travel possible—the flux capacitor.”

“Flux capacitor, huh?” Marty repeated. “Is that its real title or something you made up?”

“It’s a logical title applied by me when I decided to describe its function in one or two words. Any brilliant scientist would have arrived at approximately the same title if given the chance.”

Marty chuckled inwardly at the man’s lack of humility. He did not dislike him for it, however. As a matter of fact, he found it charmingly refreshing.

“It’s taken me almost thirty years and my entire family fortune to fulfill the vision of that day when I fell off the toilet…My God, has it been that long? I’ve been working on this for exactly…”

He reached into his inside coat pocket to withdraw a small calculator. Punching buttons quickly, he said presently: “I’ve been working on this for twenty-nine years, eleven months, and 355 days. Excluding vacations, of course, and a few weeks off for petty illnesses. Think of it. Almost thirty years. It’s amazing. Things have certainly changed during that time. This all used to be farmland here, as far as the eye could see…”

He looked off toward the horizon, dominated now by the huge department stores of the mall and sodium vapor lamps lining the periphery of their vision like ugly ornaments. “I can hardly believe it’s gone,” he murmured.

“What?”

“The farm…the years…” He suddenly looked very sad.

Marty tried to shake him out of the mood. Slapping the side of the DeLorean, he said, “This is heavy duty, Doc. I’m really impressed.”

The compliment caused a shift in Doc Brown’s attitude. His eyes turned to the present, unclouding and becoming instantly brighter, sharper.

“Yes, I’m proud of it,” he smiled.

“And it runs on, like, regular unleaded gasoline?” Marty asked.

Doc shook his head and grinned. “Unfortunately, no,” he replied. “I tried that in the beginning. That was a dream that just wouldn’t come true—to have this device run cheaply and simply. That may happen in the future, but for the moment, it requires something with a little more kick.”

“You mean, atomic power?” Marty guessed.

Nodding, Doc Brown pointed to a container with purple radioactivity signs painted on it.

“Plutonium? You mean this sucker’s nuclear?”

“Electrical, basically,” Doc Brown replied. “But I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need. The flux capacitor stores it, then discharges it all at once, like a gigantic bolt of lightning. It’s really quite efficient.”

“Hold the phone, Doc,” Marty said. “Plutonium’s illegal. Did you rip it off?”

“Of course. How else does an ordinary citizen latch onto plutonium?”

“You out and out stole it?”

“In a manner of speaking. That is, I had someone else steal it. No, that’s not quite accurate. Someone else who had already stolen it gave it to me.”

“Gave it to you?” Marty challenged. “You mean to tell me somebody just donated it?”

“What are you, a federal agent?” Doc Brown smiled. “Look, I don’t want you to know too much. It might be bad for you. All I can say is that someone had this plutonium and they gave it to me for another project. I deemed that project not only less important than mine but actually harmful to the future of society. So I killed two birds with one stone by switching the plutonium from their evil project to my progressive and kindly project.”

“You’re not screwing around with our space program, are you?”

“Nothing like that,” Doc replied sanctimoniously. “I consider the conquest of space a beneficial scheme. Perhaps scheme isn’t the best word, but rest assured I’m all for it. Now please don’t press me further. It’s for your own good that you should know no more details.”

“All right,” Marty murmured.

“Now, before we proceed further, we must protect you,” Doc said.

He strode to the step-van and removed a yellow radiation suit. “Put this on,” he said.

Marty locked the video camera and stepped into the suit. The night had become chilly and it felt good to add the extra layer of material. With the hood pulled up, he felt totally divorced from the rest of the world, like a deep-sea diver on the floor of the ocean.

Working slowly, Doc Brown took a four-inch cylinder from the step-van, handling it with great delicacy. Marty knew that within the capsule must be a plutonium rod, surrounded by water, the new source of power for the time vehicle. Inching the DeLorean closer to the truck so that the plutonium would not have to be moved far, Marty returned to the video camera and started it again as Doc Brown stepped to the rear of the car and placed the plutonium cylinder into the loading hopper. He then sealed the hopper shut and tossed back the hood of his radiation suit.

“It’s safe now,” he smiled. “Everything is lead-lined.”

Marty took off his own hood and waited for Doc Brown’s next instructions.

“Just be sure you get my send-off,” Doc Brown smiled. “It’d be a shame if everything came out on tape but that.”

“Where are you headed?”

“The future.”

“How far?”

“Whoops,” Brown muttered, snapping his fingers. “Almost forgot my luggage.”

He jogged back to the step-van, grabbed a suitcase and returned to the DeLorean. “Who knows if they’ll have cotton underwear in the future?” he said. “I’m allergic to all synthetics. It would be rather unpleasant to find myself in the future with a terrible rash.”

“Are you sure it’s safe?” Marty asked.

“My machine works,” Doc Brown retorted. “You just saw it, didn’t you?”

“I meant, are you sure the future’s safe? Suppose you run smack into the bomb? Or it’s a society of robots that take you prisoner. At least you know the past is safe. Nobody there has better equipment than you. But the future—”

Doc Brown smiled, touched by the young man’s interest in his safety. “What you say makes a lot of sense,” he admitted. “I gave it a lot of thought when I was considering where I should go first. But I’ve always dreamed of seeing the future a lot more than rehashing the past. I’d like to see where mankind’s headed, up or down. And besides,” he added with a sly chuckle, “if I head down the road a quarter century, I’ll be able to find out who won the next twenty-five World Series and Super Bowls. Won’t that be a nice piece of information to have for my old age?”

Marty nodded. “Well, be sure to look me up when you get there and I’ll fill you in on the details of what’s been happening,” he said.

“Indeed I will.”

Clearing his throat, Doc once again assumed a more serious attitude as he addressed the camera.

“I, Dr. Emmett Brown,” he began, “am about to embark on a historic journey—”

Einstein started barking furiously.

Brown halted in mid-phrase. What was it—a mall security guard, a cat, or something worse?

He heard the sound of the engine before he saw the lights. Then a sudden turn of the vehicle threw the lights directly at them, the twin glares rising and falling as the car fairly leaped over the speed bumps leading into the mall nearly a half mile down the road. It could have been joyriding teenagers, but something in the vehicle’s headlong desperation and purpose told Doc Brown that the worst had happened.

Marty stopped working the camera, looked out of the viewfinder at Doc Brown. The man’s face was ashen, his mouth open; his breath came in shallow gasps. Indeed, he exhibited every symptom of shock except a tendency to faint and that might be imminent. Locking the camera, Marty came around to the front, prepared to help Doc Brown any way he could.

“What is it?” he whispered.

Doc seemed not to hear him. His piercing eyes continued to follow the progress of the vehicle moving generally in their direction. A slight sideways turn revealed presently that it wasn’t an ordinary car or even a police cruiser. Square except for the long sloping hood, it was an ominous van, dark in color, with windows that seemed to have been blacked either by painting or the installation of dark curtains.

“You’re right, Einie…” Doc Brown finally said, stroking his dog’s head. “It’s them.”

“Who?” Marty asked.

Doc Brown seemed not to have heard him. “They found me,” he muttered. “I don’t know how, but they found me.”

Shortly after three o’clock on the afternoon of October 26, 1985, the swarthy man who was known only as Sam received the coded message from his superior officer. As he read it, his anger grew, until his dark moody eyes flashed vengefully.

“We’ve been taken in,” he said simply to the four men and one young woman who sat in the dingy motel room, awaiting instructions.

As he spoke, he slammed back the bolt of his AK 47 submachine gun, put the weapon on the table next to him and began searching in his brief case.

“We’re always being taken in,” said the young woman.

“We’re not ruthless enough. If the world knew we killed those who oppose us instead of negotiating and weaseling, we’d be unstoppable. Instead, we’re looked upon as clowns with guns.”

Sam had heard it before. His own career as an international terrorist dated back nearly thirty years and there had always been one member of the organization who wanted nothing but more killing. Sometimes it was the youngest member, anxious to show the others how tough he was; now, it was Uranda, a twenty-five-year-old ex-fashion model from Damascus who got her kicks by pumping bullets into other people’s bodies.

“Don’t worry,” Sam rasped. “We won’t be weasels tonight. There’ll be only one dead body, but it will be very very dead by the time we’re through.”