‘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 fr
om 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:
EMMETT BROWN COMMITTED.
Crackpot Inventor Declared Legally Insane!
Below the headlines was a picture of Doc, in a strait-jacket! And next to that was another headline:
NIXON TO SEEK 5TH TERM
Vows to End Vietnam War by 1985!
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.
Chapter Thirteen
‘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.