“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.”
? Chapter Fourteen ?
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.