As he spoke, Doc Brown’s eyes fell on the DeLorean and the words died in his throat.
“Good Lord,” he muttered.
“This is your time machine, Doc,” Marty smiled. “I brought it over.”
Doc Brown started to move toward it, his eyes wide with wonder, his mouth open. Marty thought he was about to start salivating.
“Now will you believe me?”
Doc Brown didn’t answer. Very deliberately, he walked in a complete circle around the machine. Then he withdrew a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Marty.
“After I fell off the toilet,” he said, “I drew this. Does it look familiar?”
Marty unfolded the sheet and immediately recognized a crude but accurate sketch of the flux capacitor. “You bet,” he answered.
He opened the car door and pulled out the real thing.
When he saw it, Doc Brown’s eyes lit up. Hopping in place, he began to shout, emitting words between the yipping sounds of happiness.
“Ha! It works…it works!” he wheezed. “I finally invented something that works!”
Suddenly he reached out to hug Marty and give him a kiss on the cheek.
“This is great!” he exuded. “This is wonderful! I can’t believe it!”
But he obviously did believe it, for the next thing he did was stand very formally, as if addressing an audience of very learned people.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a deep and sonorous voice, “and members of the Nobel committee…It is a great honor for me to accept the Nobel Prize for the year nineteen—”
He paused, turned to Marty. “What year do I get the Nobel Prize?” he asked.
Then, before Marty could speak, he waved his hands and continued. “No—wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Let it be a wonderful surprise. No man should know too much about his own destiny.”
He seemed about to address the imaginary audience again when a look of sudden realization gripped his features. “Hold it!” he said. “Wait a minute! It’s starting to come back to me now. You mentioned something about being my first guinea pig, except a dog.”
‘That’s right.”
“And you also said I left you stuck here in 1955…”
Marty nodded.
“Why would I do that?” Doc Brown demanded haughtily. “I’m a responsible scientist. Every test I’ve performed has been absolutely safe. I would never send a kid back in time and just leave him there.”
“You didn’t do it on purpose,” Marty explained. “It was an accident. Some other people intervened. Things got pretty heavy, really…”
“Heavy?” Doc said. “What does weight have to do with this problem?”
“I’m sorry. That’s just an expression. What I mean is, well, what happened after the first—”
“Wait, don’t tell me,” Brown interrupted. “My knowing too much about the future…in fact, your simply being here…could be very dangerous. We might accidentally alter the course of history—”
“I don’t think so,” Marty said. “I’m just an ordinary person—”
“You don’t understand. One molecule, one atom out of place could destroy the entire fabric of the space-time continuum…So we must be careful that we don’t do anything significant.”
Marty shrugged.
“Show me how this thing works,” Doc Brown said. “We’ve got to send you back—back to the future.”