Prologue
Great Scott!
Doc Emmett Brown never thought it would come to this.
It had all started so simply. Doc Brown still remembered the first night he had conducted the time experiment - all the way back in 1955.
A storm, which had been brewing all evening, was about to break.
The clock tower read 10:04.
The DeLorean, with its special super-conducting electrical pole added for the occasion, raced toward the electrical line.
And lightning struck the clock tower!
At the last possible second, Doc Brown connected the cables.
The hook on the pole above the DeLorean hit the electrical line - and 1.21 jigowatts of electricity flooded into the flux capacitor -
And the DeLorean vanished into the future, leaving only twin trails of fire where its wheels had been!
Ah, that was a great day for science! Of course, Doc hadn’t invented the DeLorean time machine in 1955. Heavens, DeLoreans didn’t even exist in 1955! No, it was his 1985 counterpart - a Doc Brown thirty years older and wiser - who had finally perfected attempt to correct it. After all, there was no other way for a responsible scientist to act!
He climbed into the DeLorean and set the destination display for 1985, on the morning following the time Marty returned. There was no reason, after all, for Marty not to get a good night’s sleep.
They would be very careful, Doc told himself, and there would be no mistakes. While he had been in the future, Doc had done some research into the nature of time paradoxes, and discovered their results could bo far more devastating than he had ever imagined!
But even Doctor Emmett L. Brown, with all of his intellect, could have never imagined the startling repercussions that would develop from what he was about to do.
Chapter One
Saturday
October 26 1985
10:38 a.m.
Everything - but everything - was different now!
The truck was the clincher. It was a new Toyota 4-By-4, jet black and gorgeous. And his parents had said that it belonged to him!
Marty McFly still couldn’t believe how much had changed.
Before he had gone into the past, his father had been - Marty had to face it - a wimp who liked to spend his time laughing at Jackie Gleason reruns; a wimp who let his co-worker Biff run all over him. His dad had actually done the reports and office work for both men. And his mother had reacted to all this by quietly stepping back from life. She had also started drinking more than she should. They had both been good parents, had raised Marty and his brother and sister the best they could, but still -
Before he had gone into the past! How easily he accepted all that now. It had started with his friend Doc Brown - a local inventor who everybody around Hill Valley thought was a bit of a crackpot, even for California - anyway, Doc had wanted Marty to bring along his video camera to tape the Doc’s latest experiment; turning a DeLorean into a time machine!
And. unlike most of Doc’s other experiments, the machine had actually worked, sending Doc’s sheepdog, Einstein, one minute into the future!
That’s when the terrorists had shown up. It seemed that Doc had needed some plutonium for his time machine to work, so he had gotten these guys to steal some for him, vaguely promising he would make them some bombs or something. Doc had then planned to lose himself, so that the terrorists could never find him.
The terrorists, unfortunately, had had other ideas.
They had shot Doc - not fatally, as it turned out -and chased Marty after he had climbed into the DeLorean, forcing him to speed away from their machine-guns and rocket-launchers, until the car was flat out doing eighty-eight miles per hour. And, at eighty-eight miles per hour, the DeLorean had turned into a time machine, sending Marty thirty years into the past!
He’d come close to blowing it all in 1955, but had managed somehow to get through the whole thing OK, with a little help from the 1955 version of Doc, who had also succeeded in sending Marty and the DeLorean back to the present, good old 1985.
Except that 1985 wasn’t the same anymore. Now, his father was no longer a wimp. Instead, he was a published science fiction author. And his mother wasn’t drinking any more, and she looked much thinner and years younger! Heck, now his parents even played tennis together!
Biff had changed jobs, too. He now ran an ‘auto detailing’ service, doing speciality work on cars. And Biff wasn’t bullying anybody into doing his job anymore - in fact, he was sitting in the McFly kitchen at this very minute, having a cup of coffee before he started to wax George’s car.
Even Marty’s brother and sister had cleaned up their acts. And Marty’s dream truck was sitting in the garage!
All this stuff had happened with his family and Biff, just because Marty had messed up a little bit when he had been stuck in 1955. They had been lucky that time, and everything had worked out all right. Marty knew that Doc Brown was right - it was dangerous to fool around with time.
But Doc was already gone again, off into the future. The future, not the past, had been the DeLorean’s original destination, and Doc was eager to get on with his experiment. Still, Marty wished Doc had waited a while, at least until everything had quieted down around here. The way all these things had changed - Marty thought they were great and all, but still - if you looked at it a certain way, all this change could be a little scary.
What if something else, something really serious, was wrong with this version of 1985? With all that had already happened, who knew what else could be different?
‘How about a ride, mister?’
Marty turned away from the truck at the sound of the girl’s voice. It was Jennife
r. Jennifer, with her long, auburn hair and big, brown eyes, looking every bit as pretty as the last time he had seen her-in Marty’s humble opinion, the prettiest girl in all of the senior class.
It also didn’t hurt one bit that she was Marty's girl-friend.
Some things, then, were still the same - some very important things.
‘Jennifer!’ Marty had to keep himself from jumping up and down. ‘Oh, are you a sight for sore eyes! Let me look at you!’
Jennifer took a worried half-step away as he hurried over to her.
‘Marty’ she said with a bit of a frown, ‘you’re acting like you haven't seen me in a week! ’
‘I haven’t!’ Marty answered without thinking.
She looked at him even more strangely.
‘Are you OK? Is everything all right?’
That’s right! Marty realised there was no way she could know about everything that had happened to him. He had spent a whole week back in 1955, but he’d actually come back to 1985 at almost the same time he had left - so, to somebody who had stayed put in 1985, instead of jumping around in time like Marty and the DeLorean, it was like he hadn’t been gone at all.