Back to the Future Part II (13 page)

‘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:

‘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 rub
ble
 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.’

Marty shook his head. He couldn’t understand a word.

‘English, Doc,’ he requested.

Doc picked up a fallen blackboard and propped it up against the table. Another moment’s search, and he had located a piece of chalk.

Doc drew a straight line on the blackboard.

‘Imagine that this line represents time. Here’s the present, 1985 -’

He wrote ‘1985’ in the centre of the line.

‘The past -’

He wrote ‘PAST’ to the left.

‘And the future.’

To the right of ‘1985’, he scrawled a big, fat ‘F’.

‘Now, prior to this point in time’- he pointed again to 1985 -‘somewhere in the past’- he put an ‘X’ above the line in the past -‘the time line was skewed’- he drew another line, from the middle of the past, straight down toward the bottom of the blackboard - ‘resulting in this alternate 1985. Alternate to you, me and Einstein, but reality for everyone else.’

Marty shook his head. ‘I still don’t get it, Doc.’

Doc reached in the pocket of his lab coat, and pulled out a silver bag.

‘Recognise this?’ he asked. He handed the bag to Marty. ‘It’s the bag the Sports Book came in. I know, because the receipt was still inside.’ Doc passed the receipt over, too. Yep, there it was, the name of the Antique Store, followed by the words ‘
PURCHASED: GREY’S SPORTS ALMANAC 1950-2000
’ and the incredibly inflated price. It was the book Marty had bought, and here was the bag he had carried it in. But Doc had thrown the book and the bag away, hadn’t he?

‘I found them in the time machine,’ Doc continued ‘along with this -’.

Doc pulled out a brass ornament on Ae top of a broken pole. Marty had seen that ornament before It was in the shape of a fist. In fact, he had personaUy felt that ornament, when a certain older gentleman had knocked him with it and called Marty a ‘butthead’ - in 2015! So Marty wasn’t at all surprised when he read the name engraved on the palm:
‘Biff H. Tannen’

This was the top of Biff’s cane,’ Marty explained, although he guessed that Doc already knew it. ‘Old Biff, in the future. And you found it in the DeLorean?’

‘Correct!’ Doc raised a finger to drive home his point. ‘It was in the time machine because Biff was in the time machine, with 
the
 Sports Almanac!’

‘Holy shit!’ Marty replied.

‘You see,’ Doc continued, obviously proud of his deductive abilities, ‘while we were in the future’- he pointed at the big ‘F* on the blackboard -‘Biff got the sports book, stole the time machine, went back in time and gave the book to himself at some point here - he drew a long arc, all the way from the ‘F’ to the ‘X - in the past!’

He picked up another of those large newspaper volumes from the floor, and opened the book at the place he had marked with a piece of broken ceiling tile.

‘Look.’

The headline on this issue read:

HV MAN WINS BIG AT RACES!

Underneath that was a photo of Biff collecting his winnings at the pay window.

Doc slapped the paper in front of Marty.

‘It says right here that Biff made his first million betting on a horse race in 1958. He wasn’t just lucky.

He knew - because he had all the race results in the Sports Almanac!’ Doc’s point making finger rose one more time. ‘That’s how he made his entire fortune!’

He pulled one more thing out of his lab coat pocket.

‘Look at this pocket with the magnifying glass,’ he told Marty.

Marty took the handle of the glass from Doc and held the lens over the photo. There, sticking out of Biffs pocket, was the top half of the Sports Almanac!

‘That bastard stole my idea!’ He put down the glass and looked up at his scientist friend. ‘Doc, he must have overheard me when I told you about -’

He stopped himself midsentence. This Sports Almanac scheme had been his idea. He was to blame for everything that happened to Hill Valley!

‘This whole thing’s my fault,’ he said aloud, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘If I hadn’t bought that book, none of this would have happened.’

Doc waved both his hands, as if Marty’s fears were, groundless.

Well, that s all in the past,’ Doc reassured him.

‘You mean in the future,’ Marty corrected him. 

Whatever, Doc replied, ‘it demonstrates precisely how time travel can be misused and why the time machine must be destroyed’- he paused to swallow - ‘after we straighten all of this out.’

‘Right!’ Marty agreed. So maybe there was a way out of this after all. ‘We’ve got to go back to the future and stop Biff from ever stealing the time machine!’

Doc shook his head with a frown. ‘We can’t, because if we travel into the future from 
this
 point in time’- he pointed to the line going to the bottom of the blackboard -‘it would be the future of this reality, in which Biff is wealthy and married to your mother, and in which 
this
 has happened to me!’

Doc picked up a third book, and turned to another page marked by a smaller piece of ceiling tile. He pushed the book back in front of Marty.

The paper was dated July 1983. The headline at the top of the page read:

Below the headlines was a picture of Doc, in a strait-jacket! And next to that was another headline:

This was terrible! The whole world had changed.

‘No, Marty,’ Doc went on, ‘our only chance to repair the present is in the past, at the point where the time line skewed into this tangent.’ Doc slapped his fist into his open palm. ‘Somehow, we must find out the specific circumstances of how, where and when young Biff got his hands on that Sports Almanac!’

They had to find out something from Biff? How could they possibly do that?

Marty glanced at the twin headlines in front of him; his father dead, Doc Brown committed to an asylum.

Marty ripped the page about his father’s death out of the book and stuffed it inside his jacket. Something had to be done, and he realised there was only one person who could do it.

Marty had gotten them into this. Now he’d have to get them out. It was up to him to confront Biff and get the truth.

‘I’ll ask him,’ was all Marty said.

‘The heart, Ramone.’ Clint said. ‘Don’t forget the heart.’

Ramone fired.

It had been surprisingly easy for Marty to get into Biff’s penthouse - especially with Biff distracted the way he was. He was sitting in the hot tub with a couple of well-built young women, one blonde, one redhead. Marty guessed they were showgirls from Biff’s Pleasure Palace. And Biff and the showgirls were all more or less watching some Clint Eastwood movie on a big-screen TV.

‘Aim for the heart,’ Clint murmured, ‘or you’ll never stop me.’

Ramone kept on firing.

Marty had seen this movie before. A Fistful
of Dollar
s, wasn’t it? The bullets didn't do anything to Eastwood, because he was wearing some kind of armour.

The women on either side of Biff giggled when Clint showed off the metal hiding under his serape.

Clint wasted another four guys. He didn’t even break a sweat.

‘Great flick,’ Biff murmured between puffs on his cigar. ‘Great friggin' flick.’

‘When the man with the forty-five,’ Clint said to Ramone, ‘meets the man with the rifle, you said the man without the rifle is a dead man. Let’s see if that’s true.’

The screen went black.

‘Hey!’ Biff ejaculated. ‘What the hell-’

Marty stepped out from behind the giant screen, where he had finally found the controls.

‘Party’s over, Biff,’ he said with a smile.

‘You!’ Biff demanded, waving his finger at Marty. ‘What are you doing here? How the hell did you get in here, anyway? How’d you get past my security downstairs?’

Marty just kept on smiling.

‘I managed.’

‘Well, you got just ten seconds to get your ass the hell out of here, or you’re gonna have to be carried out!’ Biff reached past the redhead and picked up the phone.

No. This was going too fast. Marty still needed to get some information.

‘There’s a little matter I need to talk to you about, ’ he added hurriedly.

‘Money, right?’ Biff paused in his phone call the smile back on his face. ‘Well, forget it.’

Marty shook his head. He had to be all business now.

‘Not money, no.’ He paused in what he hoped was a properly dramatic fashion.

‘Grey’s Sports Almanac,’ he added a moment later.

Biff stared at him.

‘You know what I’m talking about,’ Marty went on, slowly and deliberately. ‘It's a book Paperback, silver cover and jacket, with red letters, and pictures of a baseball player, a football player, a basketball player, and a jockey.’

Biff put the phone down.

‘You heard him, girls,’ he said, not taking his eyes off Marty. ‘Party’s over.’

Both women giggled as they climbed from the hot tub. Biff watched them as they left the room, then turned back to Marty.

He pushed himself out of the tub and grabbed a robe. ‘C’mon, kid. Let’s go talk where it’s private.’

Marty followed Biff into his private office. Biff went behind the desk. Marty looked down at the coffee table next to him. It was piled high with matchbooks.

‘ “Biff’s Pleasure Paradise”, the kid read aloud.

Black letters on a white matchbook. ‘Very cute.'

Biff scowled back at him. Apparently, he didn’t have time for cute.

‘Start talkin’, kid. What else do you know about that book?’

Marty stuck the matchbook in his pocket. Biff was playing right into his hands. Now, if he could just get him to tell him a little bit more.

‘First,’ Marty demanded, ‘you tell me how you got it. How, when, where -’

Biff stared at him for another minute.

‘All right,’ he agreed at last. He stood up and turned to the oil painting behind him - a full-size portrait of Biff, like he was royalty or something.

He swung the painting out on its hinges, revealing the wall safe behind.

‘November 12 1955,’ he called over his shoulder as he started on the first of the three combination locks. ‘That was when.’

‘1955?’ Marty asked. It couldn’t be! ’November 12, 1955? But thats the day I went-’ He stopped himself, confused. His nerves were showing.

‘I mean.’ Marty started again, that was the date of the big lightning storm!’

Biff nodded, setting to work on the second lock.

‘You know your history. Very good. I'll never forget that Saturday. I was pickin’ up my car from the shop, rolled it in a drag race a few days earlier.’

Drag race? Marty almost laughed.

‘I thought you crashed it into a manure truck.’

Biff stopped and glanced back at Marty.

'How do you know about that?’

Uh-oh. He shouldn't know about that, should he? Marty grinned a little sheepishly.

‘Oh - uh - my father told me about it - uh - before he died.'