“Nothing lasts forever, not even bad luck.” The horn honked again.
“I’ll call you tonight,” Marty promised.
“I’ll be at my grandma’s,” she said.
“What’s the number?”
“243-8480.”
Marty repeated the number, got two numbers transposed. “You should have saved one of those flyers,” Jennifer said. Then, looking at her hand, she saw that it still clutched one of the propaganda pieces. Waving to her father to wait, she took out a pen and wrote something on the back of the paper and thrust it at Marty. Then she hopped in the car and left. Marty waved and watched her until the car was out of sight.
Only then did he look at the paper. On it was written the telephone number and the simple phrase: “I love you.” Marty smiled.
Folding the paper, he put it in his pocket and skateboarded down the street toward home.
? Chapter Two ?
“If only I don’t die of a heart attack or a stroke first,” Dr. Emmett Brown muttered aloud.
He was close to seeing his dream become a reality. No doubt about that. One by one the scientific and physical obstacles had been eliminated. Was this to be “the day”?
“Don’t count on it,” he replied to himself. There was no use getting too high, he reasoned.
At sixty-five, he was one of the nation’s most talented and most unheralded inventors. In fact, no one except Marty McFly even knew of his accomplishments, but that didn’t matter. Soon all that would change. His lifetime of struggle, of being the recipient of ridicule, would suddenly turn golden.
He looked around his workshop, which was nothing more than a garage filled with the detritus and equipment that had been accumulated over a forty-year period. Some of that gear included a jet engine, piles of circuit boards, enough automobile parts to build at least two cars, a short-wave radio, Seeburg jukebox, workbench with welding equipment, the remnants of a robot, a working refrigerator, and dozens of clocks. Clocks were Doc Brown’s favorite collector’s item. He had everything from cuckoo clocks to digital models—and every one was in dead sync with the others.
The presence of so many timepieces was not accidental.
Time was Doc Brown’s latest, and perhaps final, dominating, interest. During the 1950s, he had tried to uncover the secrets of the human mind via a variety of mind-reading devices. None had worked. A half-decade earlier, he had been smitten with the theory that all mammals spoke a common language. Some other schemes included the notion that gold could be mined by superheating the earth’s surface, that each person’s age was predetermined and could be revealed by studying the composition of their fingernails, and he published a paper which claimed that the sex of babies could be predicted before they were conceived. The fact that all of Doc Brown’s work yielded nothing should have discouraged him but did not. Through the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and into the ’80s, he continued to experiment, earning perennial scorn as the crazy scientist of Hill Valley.
Now, on October 25, 1985, he was ready for fulfillment. He had worked out every element of his time-travel theory until it was perfect. By the end of the century, scientists and historians would be using his device to explore the future and past, and through this exploration, work to improve the present. His view of time as a dimension was summed up in the simple explanation he once gave to the editor of the Hill Valley newspaper. “I think of time as spherical and unending,” he said. “Like the skin of an orange. A change in the texture at any point will be felt over the entire skin. The future affects the past and present, just as the past and present affect the future.”
“But the past is over and done with,” the editor replied. “How can it be affected?”
“That’s just my point,” Doc Brown had retorted. “The past isn’t over and done with. It’s still there. And once we can find a way to penetrate it, we’ll be able to change things that may happen tomorrow.”
The editor didn’t buy it but he printed the interview anyway. Residents of Hill Valley either ignored the article or complained that valuable space had been wasted printing the ravings of a madman.
Such unfavorable publicity once hurt, but now that was all behind him. “If all goes well…” he murmured as he began to prepare for the evening’s work.
The sentence remained unfinished. Whistling softly, he dressed slowly in a white radiation suit, slipped the hood over his head to test its feel, then took it off, pressing it flat against his back. Checking his image in a mirror, he ruffled his wild white hair even more, perhaps perversely adding to his own reputation as a wild eccentric. He then walked to the front of the garage, opened the rear doors of the oversized step-van on the side of which was lettered DR. E. BROWN ENTERPRISES—24-HOUR SCIENTIFIC SERVICE, and peered inside.
It was, of course, still there. Even in the sparse light of the garage, the sleek stainless steel DeLorean with its gull wings shone back at him like a giant Christmas tree ornament. How appropriate, he thought, that the vehicle which would propel mankind into the past and future should be such an extraordinarily beautiful piece of machinery. There was no doubt in his mind as he closed the doors.
“It will work,” he said softly. “And I’ll be famous.”
All that remained was the final countdown check of minor items. Brown would handle that during the few hours before Marty arrived at the Twin Pines Mall and then, together, they would take a step as significant for mankind as the moon landing of 1969.
It was getting dark when Marty turned the last curve in front of his house, but he knew something was wrong long before that. Flashing lights are seldom harbingers of joy, except at Christmas, and that holiday was two months away. Through the trees blocking his home from view, he could see the flashers blinking yellow. Not the police, he thought. That would be blue and red. Yellow was the usual color of wreckers.
He was quite correct. Gliding onto the court, he could make out the tow truck poised like a giant praying mantis near the McFly driveway. In its jaws was the 1979 Plymouth Reliant, looking quite helpless with one set of wheels off the ground. As he drew closer, Marty saw that its front end was completely smashed, as if someone had driven it into a brick wall. Nearby stood Marty’s father and Biff Tannen, watching in silence as the truck driver unhitched the damaged vehicle.
George McFly was forty-seven but seemed much older to Marty. An uninspired man who was generally afraid to take even the tiniest daring step, not having changed his haircut in over thirty years, he was dressed in an equally boring suit he had purchased four years before at Sears. The man standing next to him was a sharp contrast in both sartorial color and demeanor. Just a year older than George McFly, Biff Tannen stood with his potbelly leaning unashamedly over his trouser tops, an attitude that made his loud plaid suit, pinky rings and gold
chains seem even more bizarre. Whereas George McFly was reticent, Biff was loud and obnoxious, the type of person who talks loudly in movie houses or yells epithets at players during sports events. He was, in short, an intimidating lout, and no one was more easily intimidated than his friend and associate George.
Now, as Marty approached on the skateboard, he heard the familiar tone of disgust in Biff’s voice as he addressed his father.