‘1973!’ Marty shouted to the sky. ‘No!’ He fell to his knees in front of the stone. ‘Please, God, no! This can’t be happening!’
A shadow fell across the gravestone. Marty looked up. There was someone standing behind him.
‘I’m afraid it is happening, Marty,’ a familiar voice said. ‘All of it.’
‘Doc!’ Marty cried as he turned.
Doc Brown nodded soberly down at Marty.
‘When I learned about your father,’ he explained, ‘I figured you’d come here.’
Marty stood so quickly that he almost lost his balance.
‘Then you know what happened to him?’ he asked. ‘You know what happened on’ - he turned back to the gravestone to check the date - ‘March 15 1973?’
Doc nodded again.
‘Yes, Marty, I know.’
Doc led the way into his lab - or at least what was left of it.
The place had been trashed. A lot of Doc’s gizmos had been torn apart. Pieces of experiments and bits of broken glass littered the floor, crunching underfoot as they walked. The windows had all been smashed, and most of them had been boarded up. The electricity was gone, too. Doc had lit a pair of candles when they entered, and handed one to Marty. He then proceeded to walk around the edges of the lab, lighting other strategically placed candles from the first one’s flame until the entire room was filled with a warm glow.
It didn’t matter, though. It could have stayed dark for all Marty cared. His father - dead?
Doc waved Marty over to the one table left standing, and the large and heavy bound volume open there. As Marty brought his candle close to the pages,
The book was open to the local Hill Valley paper, dated March 16 1973, the day after his father died. Marty stared at the headline:
GEORGE McFLY MURDERED!
And, in smaller type below:
Author Shot Dead in Apparent Holdup
Enroute to Receive Book Award!
Police Baffled, Search for Witnesses!
‘I went to the Public Library to try to make some sense out of all of the madness,’ Doc explained over Marty’s shoulder. ‘The place was boarded up - shut down. So I broke in and’- he waved at the book and a couple more like it still on the floor -‘borrowed some newspapers."
Marty glanced up from his reading.
‘But Doc, how can all this be happening? I mean, it’s like we’re in hell or something.’
Doc looked between the boards, studying the world beyond one of the broken windows.
‘No, it’s Hill Valley,’ he replied curtly, ‘although I can’t imagine hell being much worse.’
Einstein whined by Doc’s feet. Doc glanced down.
‘I know, Einie,’ he said with a sigh. ‘The lab’s an awful mess.’ He pulled a cushion from out of the rubble and dusted it off, then placed it on the floor.
Einstein dutifully sat on it.
Doc turned back to Marty.
‘You see, Marty,’ Doc explained in his best lecture mode, ‘the continuum has been disrupted, creating a new temporal event sequence resulting in this alternate reality - alternate to us, but reality for everyone else.’