“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 halt
ingly, “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…”