Marty looked quickly at the inside of the DeLorean as he and Jennifer crowded into the passenger seat. It looked pretty much the same way it did before, with the three digital readouts on the dashboard showing where they were set to travel in time, along with where they were now, timewise, and the last place -or rather, time - where the DeLorean had been. And the flux capacitor - the y-shaped gizmo that made this time travel stuff possible - was still glowing behind them.
Doc jumped into the driver’s seat, quickly setting the time circuits to send them into the future. He backed the car out of the driveway and started down the suburban street, heading straight for the dead end!
‘Doc,’ Marty reminded him, ‘you’d better back up. We don’t have enough road to get up to eighty-eight.’
‘Roads?’ Doc replied with a laugh. ‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.’
He reached out to the dashboard and flicked a switch that Marty didn’t recognise. There was a sound iust outside the car. Marty leaned over the top of the door just enough to see that the wheels were rotating ninety degrees to flatten beneath the bottom of the car.
That meant the tyres were no longer touching the ground.
That meant they had to be flying!
Doc gunned the car into the sky.
Marty and Jennifer looked at each other.
Nobody would ever believe this.
The DeLorean rose higher, with all three of them inside too busy and excited to look where they had come from - behind them, where Biff Tannen was out of the house, the new matchbook he'd just had printed, 'Bill's Auto Detailing', held proudly in his hand. And not one of them, Doc, Marty, or Jennifer, turned back to see Biff, the matchbook forgotten in his hand, as he watched open-mouthed while the DeLorean soared upward into the sky, then disappeared into the future.
But even if they had noticed him, none of them could have seen Biff’s eyes narrow as he wondered how a DeLorean could fly. None of them could have heard him mutter, ‘What in the hell is going on here?’ And certainly none of them could have remotely imagined the dire consequences that were to arise out of Biff having witnessed their departure.
Chapter Two
The first thing they saw were the lights. Big, bright lights, coming right for them, even though they were still flying.
There had been a triple flash of white light, followed by pouring rain. Marty realised they must be in the future. But all they could see was the rain, and those lights.
The glowing circles got larger still, and Marty could see they were attached to something even bigger, something that looked like nothing so much as a flying tractor-trailer. Whatever it was, it was bigger than big. And it was coming right toward them.
Both Marty and Jennifer screamed.
Doc jerked the wheel of the DeLorean to the right. The two vehicles missed each other by inches. The driver of the monster vehicle stuck his head out the window.
‘Stay in your own lane, maxhole!’
Own lane? Marty leaned forward, trying to get a better view of the rain-swept sky. Yeah, there were lane markers out there, small orange cones simply floating in the air.
‘What was that?’ Marty asked as soon as he managed to breathe.
‘Teamster,’ Doc replied.
‘But we’re flying!’ Marty objected.
‘Precisely!’ Doc swung the
DeLorean over to the correct side of the lane markers.
A new voice shouted angrily at them:
‘DeLorean, vector twelve, this is air traffic control!’ The voice was coming from the middle of the dashboard. Marty realised it must be some sort of radio.
‘You’ve made unauthorised entry into commercial transport airspace,’ the angry voice went on. ‘Why the hell wasn’t your transponder on? Over!’
Doc grinned at Marty and Jennifer before he replied.
‘Roger. We’re experiencing minor technical transponder difficulty. We’re descending now for repair. Over and out!’