After Doc returned to the garage, Marty remained where he was on the couch for close to an hour, too depressed and upset to move or do much else. Jennifer's words in the jail about how his disappearance had been for the best in the end, how she was happy now and didn't have any feelings left for him.... Each time they replayed in his head, he found it a little harder to breathe around the ache in his chest. And when he tried to distract himself from the memory of those words, he found himself instead remembering his slip to Doc, the look on the scientist's face and the hurt that had been so clear in his voice before he had left for the garage. Marty had gotten the clear impression that Doc didn't want to deal with him now, that he wanted to be alone, and was happy to let him have that.
Except the solitude gave him more time to brood and to sink into a deeper and deeper depression.
As it grew darker out, the lights in the room came on automatically, slowly increasing their luminance as the darkness outside increased. Marty wished that they had remained off; the gloom would have suited his mood far better. He finally got up from the couch with a sigh as heavy as his heart, mostly due to an increasing headache -- something Marty had the feeling was caused more by his mood and the disturbing repeating thoughts than his fall earlier -- and the dull ache on his lip from the punch Jennifer's husband had given him. Rummaging around in the bathroom's drawers, he found a small bottle of some futuristic fast acting Advil and took a couple of the pills in the hopes of easing the pains. As he swallowed the pills, he heard a strange, muffled pounding noise that came in the direction of the garage. The sound repeated again, and again, in a kind of rhythm: ka-thwack, ka-thwack, ka-thwack... Wondering what the heck it was, Marty decided he was curious enough to investigate and not really care about the consequences.
The noises, not terribly surprising, were indeed coming from the garage. Marty hesitated a long moment outside the door, wondering if he should just ignore the noises and go back to the living room and watch some TV or something in hopes of erasing this entire nasty day from memory. But what was Doc doing in there? It sounded almost like he was taking a bat to the new Aerovette. Marty finally drew a deep breath, then opened the door slowly.
The scientist was kneeling in the doorway of the driver's side of the Aerovette, looking like he was trying to detach the seats from the floor. A strange little tool that looked like a cross between a hammer and a wrench was in his hand, and when he slipped it between the narrow cracks around the seat and between the frame of the car, the tool did something that caused the entire seat and car to shudder a little, gradually shaking the seat out of the car's frame and causing that odd, loud noise.
Marty watched Doc for a couple minutes, not saying anything, waiting for his friend to notice him. When the inventor did not, his attention focused intently on what he was doing to the car, Marty cleared his throat tentatively and asked, "What are you doing?"
Doc didn't look up to answer. "I'm trying to remove the seats so I can install some equipment and circuitry behind them," he said.
"Need any help?" Marty asked.
There was the scarcest hesitation. "All right," the inventor said. "If you want, you can separate that box of microchips on the table. They're all mixed together."
Marty accepted the task with a nod, though Doc couldn't see it. They worked in a rather strained silence for a while, the only sounds from Doc's task and the faint plastic clicks as Marty sorted the microchips. Finally, Doc got one of the seats safely removed and set aside. He looked over at Marty seated at the worktable they had set up the day before. "Are you hungry?" he asked.
"Not really," Marty said. Jennifer's words had robbed him of any appetite. He also had the distinct feeling that sleep would be all but impossible later, making tonight his second all nighter in a row. Well, Marty supposed, he'd slept more than his share the last couple weeks when he'd been sick. A few nights of going without wasn't going to kill him.
"Me neither," Doc said. "Just as well. The less time we spend on other things, even just eating and resting, the quicker we can finish the time machine."
Marty looked up from his task to run his eyes around the garage. With various portions of the car temporarily removed, a number of half-started gizmos and devices scattered about, sheets of paper and plans tacked to the walls, and even more equipment, parts, and supplies strewn across the floors and table, it looked like getting home was a distant dream that'd take at least a year to complete. Marty sighed, suddenly exhausted.
"It's gonna take forever, anyway," was his gloomy opinion. "Didn't it take you years to build the other machines?"
"Not with the second DeLorean," Doc said. "Of course, I had the blueprints to it, still. And I suppose I had more hands helping then as well. You did. Verne and especially Jules did a great deal, and Clara--" His voice broke. He stopped for a moment before continuing. "Even with all the help, however, it took about five weeks. Of course, I was also busy with the move and remodeling then, too...."
A glimmer of a previously unexplored idea occurred to Marty then. "What if we got some more help?" he suggested.
"Utterly out of the question," Doc said immediately, his tone leaving no room for argument. "We can do this with just us. It'll just take our full focus."
Not feeling up to an argument -- which Marty just knew would be the end result if he pressed the issue, what with both their current moods -- he dropped it. But, a little later, a most disturbing thought came to him.
What if doing a rush job means one of us makes a mistake, it isn't caught, and something goes wrong with the time machine?
The idea joined the other worries, concerns, and depressing memories already circling through the poor time traveler's head. And, like the others, it continued to whisper and tug at him for hours, no matter what he did to try and put it out of mind.
* * *
By the time midnight hit, Doc was feeling the first twinges of hunger, despite the news Marty had blurted out earlier that was nagging at him more than he would've liked. Figuring that he'd better eat when he felt like it or suffer decreasing energy and poor concentration as a result, he asked Marty -- who was quietly helping with assembling parts in little piles for different devices of the time machine that the inventor was going to have to construct -- if he wanted anything. Marty agreed, and the two of them took a fifteen minute break to split a small hydrated pizza before returning to the garage.
As he worked on soldering together a bank of circuits, part of Doc's concentration was distracted by the slip about Clara. That she had died came as a great shock to him. When, on a previous trip to the future, it had been discovered that he had turned up missing in 2007, his wife had been alive and well ten years later. Granted, his being away sixteen years previous to that first disappearance could have easily changed that in some way -- what if, for example, she'd had some kind of accident between 1991 and 2007 that he'd been around to prevent or help her with? -- but the discrepancy bothered him considerably.
And how had she died? Doc's brain cooked up all manner of possible ways, all of which disturbed him. Had it been an illness? Grief at his disappearance? A broken heart? An accident like a car crash or a plane crash? Had she simply slipped while in the shower, struck her head and drowned because she had been alone in the house? Had she been murdered? Each variation on the theme was just as distressing as the last.
Only Marty's words carried any sort of hint, that she had died because she cared for him so much. It implied something that he had never thought his spouse was capable of: suicide. The mere concept gave him a nasty case of chills and an even worse ache in his gut. Even if the situation had been reversed, and it was she who had become trapped or lost in time, he didn't believe he could do something like that to himself. Doc supposed he was probably too fiercely optimistic for his own good sometimes; though the idea of Clara passing before him was possible, it was his intention that it would simply not happen, not with time machines and access to future medicine. But as much as he loved her and as much as he cared for her, he just didn't believe that killing himself to end his life and the pain he'd feel was in him.
"I finished sorting the stuff," Marty said, his voice shattering the dark thoughts running through the scientist's head. "What next?"
Doc exhaled, wishing he could dispel the things in his head as easily he could the air in his lungs, and looked first at the organized piles Marty had collected on the tables, then at the clock he'd hung on the wall -- it was just after three in the morning -- and finally at the young man himself, who was beginning to look a little ragged. "You can get some sleep now if you want," he said.
But Marty shook his head. "Forget it. I feel wide awake and I don't think I could sleep if I wanted to."
If Marty was experiencing even a fraction of what Doc was, from learning about things better left unexplored in the future, the inventor didn't doubt it. He shuddered at the mere idea of trying to rest now, knowing all he'd get was even more time to focus on the bothersome thoughts without distraction. And, if by some miracle he did manage to drift off, the thoughts would probably manifest in nasty nightmares.
"All right," he said. "If you're up to it, you can help me with holding some of these bigger boards still while I attach them."
Marty accepted the task without a word, though his silence was short lived. Doc supposed it was inevitable. Though they were both speaking to one another, deliberately avoiding the matter that was weighing heavily on both of them, there was still a faint undercurrent of tension in the air. Doc didn't particularly want to talk about it, but Marty seemed to figure enough was enough or just wanted to clear the air between them.
At any rate, less than five minutes after starting to hold the boards, he opened his mouth and said, "Are you mad at me, Doc? 'Cause I really am sorry about what happened earlier, and I know it must be bothering you right now. But am I bothering you, too?"
Doc was silent for a long moment as he assembled his thoughts and feelings. "I'm not mad at you, exactly," he settled on, which wasn't a lie by any means. "I just don't understand why you had to go and pry when you really shouldn't've."
Marty shrugged as well as he could trying to hold something still with his hands. "I already told you," he said, sounding mildly frustrated. "I just wanted to know why. And I'm surprised you don't understand that. You're a scientist, an inventor. I know you've done things before to see the reasons behind stuff."
"That's entirely different," Doc said, certain about that. "My experiments and research were in matters where they would not hurt my feelings or the feelings of others. I just don't see how you can give such little regard to my word or thoughts to my feelings about this."
Marty snorted softly. "It's not like I tried to find out about your family, Doc. And I didn't think what happened to Jennifer would really affect you one way or the other. It was my choice what I did." He paused, moving his hand to a new piece as Doc finished soldering the old. "And I'm living with the consequences."
"As am I," Doc said dryly. "Your actions aren't just affecting you, Marty. They affect everyone else you come into contact with, as do your reactions to things. Haven't you learned that by now, after everything we've gone through on trips like these?"
"But why shouldn't I do what I want?" Marty asked.
"Out of consideration for others," Doc said immediately, having been ready for such a question.
Marty frowned, the expression, combined with his still swollen lip, really making him look like a sulky child who wasn't getting his way. "But, for the last time, I didn't think that my checking up on Jen was going to do much. I sure as hell didn't intend to get arrested outside her house."
"What were your intentions, then?" Doc asked, having had a very good idea what they might be. "You don't stop by someone's house unless you intend to visit with them."
"I did," Marty admitted. "I wanted to see Jennifer face to face and ask her why she married someone after I left, since I'd supposedly been the only one for her. But I think I'd changed my mind by the time I was almost to her front door, and that's when the cops showed up."
"Didn't you stop to think about what seeing you would do to her?" Doc asked, glancing up for a moment at his friend.
"You said this is a future that won't happen once we go home," Marty said. "So I didn't think that it would matter what she felt if she was never gonna have to live through it."
"But you were," Doc said. "And as much as we might like them to, memories of different versions of time or reality aren't erased as easily as the reality."
"Not knowing was killing me," Marty said, his voice soft.
"But do you feel any better knowing now?"
"No," Marty said. He paused again, this one longer, as he moved to hold a new panel still for the scientist. "Doc, do you think Jennifer really loves me? The one back home, I mean, not the one now."
The words were uttered with a quiet urgency, and Doc answered without hesitation. "I don't think she'd marry you if she didn't, Marty."
"That's the thing," Marty said. "Here she didn't. She was glad we didn't marry."
Doc sighed softly as he squinted at the tiny connection he was trying to secure. "The Jennifer you met this afternoon is not your fiancee. She's a product of quite different life experiences, a possibility of what Jennifer could become if things had gone different."
"I know that. But she's happy now, Doc. She thinks my leaving was the best thing, in the end." Marty paused again. "Maybe we shouldn't get married."
Doc looked up, despite holding his soldering tool an inch away from the circuits. "That's ridiculous," was his immediate opinion.
"Is it? I love her more than anything, Doc. But if she's going to leave me in a few years for some jerk at work...."
"Jennifer would not cheat on you," the scientist said, certain of that to the marrow. "I'm sure she wouldn't have become involved with this man if you and she had been together. They might not have had the opportunity to work together, then."
"Maybe," Marty allowed. "But how do you know for sure?"
Doc sighed, drawing his hand back and turning his full attention to Marty. "There are few certainties in life, even with a time machine," he admitted. "But I've checked up on you both before, Marty, and in every single investigation, I've found the both of you together and quite happy, if the evidence I found was any indication."
"What about that first trip to 2015?" Marty asked. "Or the way things were in 2017?"
Doc arched an eyebrow at him. "I'll agree with you on the first point about that being an exception," he said. "But things in 2017 were fine before you decided to take your future into your own hands and corrected a mistake that was meant to happen. And since you also fixed that, that particular future will never happen."
"Maybe we seemed happy from far away, but weren't," Marty said darkly.
"I doubt that very much," Doc said. "There are certain signs that are visible in poor marriages and I've known you so long that I'd also know how to spot signs of trouble or unhappiness, even if all I had to go on were distant observations. Trust me, Marty, what you see here is not a sign of deeply hidden feelings on Jennifer's part; it's just what would happen if you happened to vanish from her life a week before your marriage."
"But Clara never remarried when you disappeared."
"No," Doc agreed, "but considering what happened to her here, instead, I'd much prefer that she had."
"But what if Jen's just marrying me 'cause she think she has to, 'cause that's what she saw in the future?" Marty said, remaining stubbornly pessimistic.
Doc sighed again. "If you feel like that's the case, talk to her when we get back," he said. "Tell her what happened and ask her these things yourself. I know what she'll say, Marty, but I think you need to hear those things from her mouth directly."
The inventor was pleased that his words finally seemed to make some sort of impact on Marty. The young man nodded once, sighed himself, and looked back down at the project. Doc happily picked up his tool again and leaned in to make the connections. But Marty's new bout of silence lasted only a couple minutes.
"What about you, Doc?" he asked, a tentative note to his voice. "Even if you know this future won't happen, aren't you upset about Clara?"
Doc glanced up and leveled a hard look at the young man that said volumes. Marty swallowed hard and looked back down at the project between them. "Right," he said. "That was a stupid question. I'm sorry."
"I don't want to know anything more, even if it won't happen," Doc said evenly. "I don't expect you to understand that."
"I don't," Marty said, rather bluntly. He shifted the subject slightly. "I remember the night you tested the first DeLorean you were all excited about going to the future and checking it out, a lot more than you were with the past. What happened?"
Doc didn't want to talk about this now. "The future is whatever you want it to be, Marty," he said. "None of it is set in stone. Why bother myself with seeing things that might not happen, good or bad?"
"Why even go to the future, then?" Marty asked.
"There are certain technological and medical advantages," the scientist answered. "If there weren't, we wouldn't really be here right now, would we?"
It was a not-so-subtle dig as to the reason they were there in the first place and the inventor felt bad as soon as it left his lips. A shadow of hurt flickered across Marty's face and he drew back a little. "I just don't understand why you're so weird about the future, Doc," he said softly. "You seem to know tons about what'll happen to me down the road, even though you're not telling me, but have you ever looked up your own family?"
"No man should know too much about his own destiny," Doc said immediately, leaning in close to finish a tricky connection.
Marty rolled his eyes. "Whatever," he said. "You said it yourself -- the future can be changed. Did something happen once? Did you try to find out about your future before and found out something bad?"
Doc looked up at him as he finished the connection. "Hold this piece now, please," he said, gesturing to a rather bulky board propped against the wall. Marty did as asked, but a look of frustration blossomed across his face.
"Doc, what is it? Something happened, didn't it?"
"It's in the past," Doc said as he leaned in again to connect the new board to the main components.
"But it's affecting your present if you're acting like this," Marty said rather shrewdly.
All right, then, Doc thought. If Marty wasn't going to let the subject drop -- and, since it had come up more times than he wished in the last few days, it was clear he wasn't -- he might as well know. If it stopped the incessant grilling, it would be more than worth it. "The first time I went to 2015, I looked myself up," the inventor explained, looking the young man straight in the eyes as he addressed him. "And I wasn't there."
"You mean you weren't alive?" Marty asked.
"No; I simply wasn't there. I could find no record about myself since the mid-eighties. It looked like I'd vanished off the planet. And I found that profoundly disturbing. I spent a good amount of time in the library, researching the latest papers and writings about space-time, time travel theories, and so on, and I started to harbor my own explanation -- perhaps when time travelers left to go to the future, they were seeing the state of things as they were upon the departure, that being there were no incarnations of them around. That when they departed from their time to a point in the future, there were no future versions of themselves to see until they returned home safely from the trip."
Marty frowned as he digested the words. "I guess I get it," he said. "But that's not how things've gone, otherwise you couldn't've taken Jen and I to the future to help out our kids."
"Yes," Doc agreed. "And that was partially why I did that -- I was curious to see if that was why I'd gone missing. If we had arrived there and I found that you and Jennifer and your children didn't exist then, I would've had confirmation for my theory." He paused. "But that wasn't so."
"Did you ever talk to the me of the future then?" Marty asked. "He might've been able to tell you more about why you weren't around."
"I thought about it," Doc admitted. "I almost did, once or twice. But when I researched into your life and discovered what had happened to you, I decided against it. I had the feeling that you wouldn't be particularly happy to see me, or might be embarrassed at the result of your less than ideal life. I didn't want to put you in that position, considering what I'd seen had happened to you and your family in late October.
"Anyway, I stayed in 2015 a few weeks mostly doing research and checking things out. I'd decided something had to be done about you and Jennifer and your family, of course, and spent some time working out just what I was going to do and when I could most likely fix things. I also wondered if perhaps I had died prior to 2015 and it just hadn't been recorded for one reason or another, so I got the latest overhaul in the future, hoping that might prevent a death due to medical reasons. I also had the DeLorean hover converted, the Mr. Fusion installed.... I kept busy."
Marty suddenly snapped the fingers of his free hand. "I know why you weren't there," he said. "You got sent back to 1885 and were stuck there!"
"I thought about that later," Doc said. "And it did make some sense... except that if that was the reason I wasn't in 2015, it would seem to indicate to me that our lives are on a partial destiny, at least, and I don't think that's entirely so."
"Yeah, but haven't you basically said that the futures we see are those that are the most likely when we leave? So maybe the future you saw was the most likely for you then."
"If that was the case, I wasn't living happily in the Nineteenth Century on that first trip," Doc said. "I was shot by Buford and in a very old, forgotten grave." He sighed as Marty opened his mouth to say something else, waving his hand at the young man. "We could debate about this all night," he said. "To this day I don't really know why there wasn't a future incarnation of me on that first trip to 2015, but it made me rather hesitant -- to say the least -- to look up myself on future trips. Especially considering the second time I'd heard anything about my future, I was missing again and had to see my family deal with the aftermath."
Marty was quiet a moment as he considered the words. "That makes sense," he finally said. "I think I might feel the same if that happened to me. But checking things out in 2017 helped you fix that bad future from ever happening. So it can be a good thing, Doc."
"Perhaps so," the scientist allowed. "But I'm not particularly comfortable with it. It would be hell to discover something bad is looming ahead and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Or you tried to stop it, but it kept happening regardless."
"So you look me up anyway...?" Marty asked, raising an eyebrow.
Doc smiled faintly as he turned his attention back to soldering. "From afar," he said. "And just to make sure everything's fine. Which it is, or rather, will be, once we get back home."
"So why don't you let me check up on you when everything's fixed?" Marty suggested. "I think that's fair, and I won't say anything to you about it unless I think something's seriously screwy and I'd need your help to fix it."
Doc thought about it for a long moment as he worked. "That has the potential for a lot of complications," he said. "And, no offense Marty, but you aren't that great at keeping secrets or hiding things."
Marty shrugged, a kind of "suit yourself" gesture. "Fine, but I think you might feel a lot better knowing someone was keeping an eye on things for you. I know I do."
"The rest of the world doesn't have that luxury," Doc said. "And I'll get by without it, too."
* * *
Over the course of the next several hours, and into the late morning hours, Doc assembled a number of circuit boards and components for the new time machine, with Marty's assistance. With the rising of the sun came another break for food and, this time, some strong coffee and caffeinated drinks. Though his mind was still disturbed with the news of Clara, Doc was starting to feel the accumulation of hours spent huddled over microchips and circuit boards, making critically important and delicate connections. His head and neck ached the worst, likely a problem that would only be alleviated by a few hours of sleep that Doc didn't feel like sparing at the moment. So he took a couple Advil with some black coffee and plowed onward.
Marty kept up the pace, waving off Doc's suggestions that he could get a little rest and not slow the project down, as there were some things that only the scientist himself could do, with no help needed or necessary. Doc continued to use him to sort parts and grab tools and to hold wires and circuits and chips still as he soldered them into place on boards.
Marty was doing just that close to noon, holding a couple wires in place as Doc went about attaching them, when the scientist heard a faint metallic clank, followed by a whooshing and sizzling sound. He snapped his head up to see the can of Power Pepsi, a soda fortified with caffeine and other energy boosters, that Marty had brought from the kitchen lying on its side and the soda swiftly spreading to the microchips, circuit boards and wires spread out and waiting for their turn to be attached. Soaked with the sugary, carbonated liquid, they would be all but useless and they'd lose half a night's work, at least.
"Marty!" Doc gasped. He dropped his tool to the ground and reached for the soldering rag he'd been using to clean up the work with one hand while sweeping the electronics out of the way of the spreading puddle with the other. Marty, however, was no help and when Doc had the spill under control and safely contained, he saw why. The young man was leaning up against the wall, sound asleep, one hand still holding the wires for attachment and the other lying limply next to the can he had accidentally knocked over.
Doc shook him by the shoulder until he opened his eyes. "Go to bed," the scientist said, gently but firmly.
Marty blinked. "I'm fine," he said around a yawn.
"No, you're not. You just knocked over your soda because you fell asleep. I caught the spill before it could hit the electronics and ruin 'em, but you need to go to bed, get some sleep. It won't do either of us any good if a mistake is made because we didn't listen to our own body's need for rest."
Marty frowned. "Does that go for just me or you, too?" he asked. "You've been up all night too, Doc."
"But I still have another day on you; I wasn't up all night checking out things on the Internet like you did the first night we were here."
The young man couldn't say anything in response to that. "Fine," he said. "I'll take a nap. But if you need me for anything, get me, okay? It's my fault we're even in this mess in the first place and I'm not gonna let you have to deal with putting everything back together on your own."
"I'll do that, then," Doc agreed. He followed Marty into the house to grab some paper towels to clean up the spill, then got back to work.
* * *
When Marty woke up, groggy and disoriented, he was staring right at the glowing numerals of the clock in his darkened room. Ten 'til six. But was it six A.M. or P.M.? The gloom of the room made it impossible to tell; at either time, the sun would still be barely there in early November. He finally concluded that it was probably six in the evening the same day. He doubted that Doc would've let him sleep some eighteen hours, and he didn't feel very rested. Having been ordered to bed around noon, he'd had just about six hours of sleep. Not enough after being awake two days -- two stress filled days at that -- but it was better than nothing. And he didn't intend to let himself get more, despite the almost overwhelming temptation and comfort of the bed. Sleeping too much had sort of been what got them into the mess in the first place.
After a stop in the bathroom to splash some cold water on his face in the hopes of waking up his brain a little, Marty headed for the garage to check up on the progress and throw himself back into work. The door opened silently, with only the faintest of whispers, and Marty saw immediately that Doc was still at it, working in the Aerovette this time and mounting some of the boards and components they'd made behind the seats. The scientist didn't look up at the sound of the door opening, didn't even see Marty. After watching him work a moment, noticing the weary and, at the same time, slightly frantic expression on his face, Marty stepped back into the condo and let the door shut quietly. He headed for the ENIC, deciding that it was time to do what he'd been thinking about on and off the whole night. And if Doc wanted to scream at him for it later, then he'd take it.
The Doc is not gonna rest, no matter what he says, Marty thought as he called up what he wanted on the screen. This is the only way I think I'll feel better, even though it's kinda drastic. Doc will understand later... probably.
But after the conversation they'd had earlier, Marty knew it was a big probably. Nevertheless, he collected what he needed, called a cab, and left the house.
And prayed that, this time, he wouldn't get arrested for paying a visit to someone's home.
Monday, November 5, 2030
7:09 P.M.
The address that the cab arrived at was both familiar and foreign to Marty. He paid the fare and sent the vehicle on its way without a clear idea, again, of how he was gonna get home, but if his plan worked, getting back to the condo wouldn't be much of a problem. After the cab had left, he stood on the sidewalk and stared at the home before him. The last almost-forty years hadn't changed things too much from what he saw. The building looked a little older and was painted an entirely different color -- slate gray -- the trees and plants around it were considerably larger and Marty could see a new building in the back, larger than a garage but smaller than the old barn.
He was standing at 2115 Elmdale Lane, the once home of Doc and his family, and now the home of Dr. Jules Brown.
Marty had been surprised when he had found Jules to be living at this address, considering that his mother had died in more or less the backyard. He wasn't quite sure if he'd want to be living in his parents' house if one of them had died on the property; it was kind of creepy. Then again, he had no idea what this version of Jules would be like. It was possible things like that didn't bother him. Doc had lived in his parents' mansion after they had died, and it was sort of the same thing.
After staring for a few minutes, Marty headed up the walkway to the front porch, wondering if this version of Doc's son would be anything like the one he'd met in 2017. That Jules had been a somewhat stuffy bachelor, a professor at the university busy with building his own time machine. Marty had a feeling that the job Jules was doing now hadn't changed -- he'd been listed as a doctor in the online phone directory -- but some things clearly had. The other Jules hadn't been living in his family's home, quite possibly because Clara had been alive and well then. And the place he had been living during that future had been a little run down and ragged around the edges. If the exterior was any indication, this home had no such problems.
Lights burned inside, though semitransparent curtains over the windows made it impossible to see any details inside. Like he had when approaching the door at Jennifer's house, Marty found himself dragging his feet as he stepped onto the porch. He wondered if he'd committed another stupid act and if this Jules would slam the door in his face and order him off the property, wanting no part in what Marty was going to ask of him.
There was really only one way to find out.
Marty found the doorbell and pushed it. He didn't hear any chimes in the house, but a minute later footsteps were heading towards the door and it slid open quietly, revealing a dark-haired woman standing in the doorway. "Can I help you?" she asked as Marty's jaw dropped.
"Clara?" he half whispered, taking a step back and feeling dangerously close to fainting.
The woman frowned, tilting her head to one side as she looked at him, and, with the light catching the face in a different way, Marty realized it wasn't Doc's wife whom he was looking at. The shape of the face was subtly different, more of a rounded oval shape, the curly hair was worn shorter, just touching the shoulders, the woman's build and stature was slightly more petite, and, most telling, her eyes were blue, not brown, and a little larger in her face than Clara's were. Her age, too, was quite different, likely in her late thirties or early forties, not well into her eighties as Clara would be now.
"Clara was my mother," the woman said, her voice suddenly guarded.
"Emily!" Marty realized with a gasp. "Oh my God, you're... you're all grown up!"
Emily Brown stepped forward and stared hard at him. "Who are you?" she asked.
Marty was kind of surprised she didn't know; then again, she had been about three-and-a-half when they'd gone missing. That would make her.... forty-two now, he realized. It boggled his mind. "Uh, is this where Jules lives?" he asked instead, not wanting to tell her who he was without someone there who would recognize him. It was possible that Emily might think he was pulling a prank if he told her who he was and slam the door in his face.
"Who wants to know?" Emily asked, shifting her body so that she was blocking the way into the house.
"Tell him that an old friend is here for a visit, and that it's in his best interest if he sees me," Marty said, rather cryptically.
Emily stared long and hard at him, then closed the door. Marty waited uneasily, wondering if she was going to fetch her older brother or call the cops. After what seemed like forever -- but was probably no more than two or three minutes -- the door was opened again, this time by Jules.
Now fifty-four, Jules looked sort of like an older version of the one Marty had met in 2017. His hair was starting to get flecks of grey near the ears, and there were a few more lines on his face, deeper ones, but his way of dressing -- neatly, in pressed slacks and a sweater right now -- and the way he wore his hair -- short and neat -- was pretty much the same. In a way, though, Marty found himself sort of surprised, especially considering the way Jules had been acting and dressing in the months prior to their departure. He would've been less surprised to find the kid -- well, now he was a grown man -- in some illegal operation or whatnot than as a doctor or professor at a university, which Marty was assuming Jules was.
The thoughts ran through his head in quick succession, in just enough time for Jules to look at Marty, do a double-take, and gasp, flinching back a little. "Marty McFly! What are you doing here?" He frowned a little, not giving the young man a chance to answer. "Does this have anything to do with today's date?"
"Today's date?"
"November fifth -- the anniversary of Dad's flux capacitor conception. It'd be seventy-five years, now."
Marty had to smile at that. It was terribly appropriate, he had to admit. "I didn't even notice.... No, Doc and I were in the neighborhood and I thought I'd drop by."
Jules' eyes widened. "Dad is here?" He leaned out the door and craned his neck, trying to see past the young man and into the street beyond.
Marty waved his hand in a so-so gesture. "Not here with me right now, but he is in town, now. Can we go inside and talk? It's kind of a long story."
"Oh, sure." Jules stepped aside to let Marty in. "Emily and I were just finishing dinner, and I think we might have some left over if you'd like something...."
"I'm fine," Marty said, following the older man as he headed to the kitchen in the back. He tried not to stare too much at the interior of the house as he went, mentally comparing it with the way it was back in 1991. A lot of the furniture had changed, some walls had been painted or papered over, and it wasn't quite as neat as Clara kept things. Dustbunnies lurked in the corners of the hallway and there were a few cobwebs clinging to the light fixtures above.
When they entered the kitchen, Marty saw at once that this room had been given a complete overhaul, with slick appliances, different decoration and counter tops and better lighting installed. Emily was clearing the table of dishes and her eyes followed Marty as he came in on the heels of Jules. Perhaps seeing his sister's puzzled expression, Jules was quick to explain. "Emily, this is Dad's old friend, Marty McFly."
Emily set the plates in her hand down in the sink and turned to look at him with so much intense scrutiny that Marty started to feel uncomfortable. Just when he was about to ask her if she wanted more proof that he was who he said he was, she shifted her eyes over to Jules. "Are you serious?" she asked him. "He's younger than I am!"
"Doc -- ah, your father -- and I came from 1991," Marty explained quickly. "So I would be younger than you now, yeah."
"1991 -- that's when you both vanished," Jules said, nodding to himself. "What happened?"
Marty went through the entire story in a few minutes, concluding with the reasons he was there in the first place. "I know Doc'll probably have a fit, but I came here hoping you -- and Emily and Verne, if they can and want -- could help build this new time machine. Doc and I are gonna run ourselves into the ground if you don't, and I'm afraid he could make a mistake in his rush and exhaustion that could be bad. It'll go a lot faster with five pair of hands instead of two, and I know you guys can do this sort of thing."
Emily and Jules exchanged a long look between them for a moment, and Marty had an awful moment where he was sure he was about to be kicked out. But Jules looked back at him and nodded, his face showing no anger or irritation. "I'll help," he said.
"And I will, too," Emily said, her entire attitude towards Marty considerably softened now that she knew who he was and why he was there.
"Do you think Verne will, too?" Marty asked.
The siblings exchanged another look. Jules finally spoke. "That's not possible, Marty. Verne... he died in 2012. In a car accident." Upon Marty's stunned look, the older man clarified. "He moved to L.A. after college to be an actor and to sort of make a new start where his family wasn't a local mystery. He was actually in a pretty successful sitcom when he died, on his way to a taping. It was raining on the freeway down there, a driver lost control...." Jules shrugged helplessly.
Emily spoke up. "We wanted to stop it," she said. "But Jules didn't finish his own time machine until eight years later, and by that time there was too much of a risk of changing things a lot if Verne had lived that extra time." She sighed softly. "It was the same thing with Mom."
Marty, who had taken a seat at the kitchen table while he had talked, leaned forward with his forehead in his hands. "Oh man," he said miserably, thinking of the blond kid he knew lying in a cold grave somewhere. "That never happened before... I'm so sorry, you guys. I'm so sorry.... This whole thing is my fault in the first place. I've completely wrecked your family."
"From what you've told us, the only one at fault was the person who struck you," Jules observed. "So, should we head off to see Dad now? The sooner we start helping, the sooner you both can go back home, and all of our futures will be a whole lot better."
* * *
They headed over to the condo in Emily's car. She didn't live with Jules, Marty discovered, residing in an apartment across town, but the siblings tried to have dinner once or twice a week together and he had just happened to come over on such a night. As she drove them across town, Jules and Emily told Marty a little bit about themselves. The news, like that of Clara and Verne, was far from cheery and happy.
Neither had married; out of all the Brown children, only Verne had, and he had been killed just after the birth of his first child, a daughter. His wife, Chrissy, and daughter, Emmaline, had moved to Montana after the accident, where Chrissy's family lived. They kept in touch with Jules and Emily, but the Brown children rarely saw their niece and old sister-in-law.
Emily had grown up with few memories of her father. She still called him Daddy, Marty noticed, though he wasn't sure if that was due to the timing of his disappearance from her life, when he was just Daddy to her, or simply something she'd do regardless. She had shown a prodigy-like talent with computers, but rather then use them for good, she had gotten into hacking around the age of ten, through the influence of some boys at school. Her skill at it had eventually gotten her into trouble; when she was fifteen she had been caught getting into the high school system to alter some grades for some friends who were paying her for her work. The police had discovered evidence of other illegal computer activities when they had confiscated her machine, and, due to strict laws recently passed for those breaking into computer systems, she had been sent to the local juvenile hall until her eighteenth birthday.
"I don't know why I did that now," Emily admitted. "It was pretty stupid, and I could've put my talent to better use. Peer pressure, probably, and easy money. And maybe I just wanted some attention. Mom was always distracted and sad from what happened with Daddy, Jules and Verne were on their own...." She sighed softly. "But it's not really any excuse, I guess."
When she had been released, Emily found the only college that would accept her was the local community one and attended classes there, later transferring to HVU to finish her degree in computer science. However, upon graduation, she found that her foolish choices in her teen years cast a long shadow, and finding a job in the area of computers was all but impossible.
A month after Emily graduated college, Clara had died in the fire, pushing Emily into a deep depression that came to a head with a suicide attempt by swallowing a bottle of painkillers with a bottle of wine. However, she had panicked after taking the pills, called for an ambulance before she passed out, and survived. After she was released from the hospital, she checked herself into a mental health clinic and remained there for a year, enduring intensive therapy and treatments for her problems. Just when she was ready to leave it, Verne, to whom she had been tremendously close, had been killed, and she had remained in the clinic for another year, trying to get her life in order.
"Basically, they think that I'm having all these problems because my father left when I was so little, so I have these fears of being abandoned and from lacking a good male role model while growing up," Emily concluded. "It didn't help that Mom and Verne had to die, too."
After leaving the clinic, she had jumped from job to job for a while, finally settling in at a local graphic design agency that hadn't balked at her juvenile record and hired her to run their computer system. The work was "hypnotically easy and duller than a used crayon," but it gave her a steady paycheck.
Jules had had similar setbacks in his life. When Doc had vanished, his oldest son had reacted by avoiding his family and his own feelings on the matter, spending more time with the friends he now called "burnouts." Trying to ignore what was going on with his family, as well as put his "goody-goody brainiac and overachieving image" behind him, he had started to smoke and tried drinking once at a party -- "but Dad's reaction to alcohol had passed onto me and I passed out with one shot," Jules explained. "I got so sick later and caught so much grief from my friends that I never tried it again."
Jules figured he probably would've done worse than smoke cigarettes, participate in skipping classes, and pull off some petty crimes had one of his friends, Mark Gibson, not almost died at a party from alcohol poisoning when he was sixteen. The trauma of rushing him to the emergency room and being chewed out by doctors and nurses about how Mark might suffer brain damage from his stupid choice, and so on, had shaken up Jules enough to pull away from the bad influences and turn back to the books as an escape. He graduated near the top of his class in high school, went to HVU and finished in three years with a degree in physics, then spent another two years pursuing a master's in the area. Afterward, he had gone on to teaching at the university, where he was to this day.
When Clara had died, Jules had been the one to inherit the house (while Emily and Verne came into money, which they needed more than their older brother) and hadn't hesitated to move in and rebuild a lab out back for his own needs. A decade after his mother had died, Jules had completed his own time machine, but had had the device for less than a year before the new lab burned to the ground while he had been out of town at a convention. The time machine, and all the notes and plans, had been completely destroyed in the fire. Although Jules had reconstructed the lab again, on the site, he hadn't done so with a new time machine, taking it as a kind of sign that perhaps he should leave well enough alone, especially since his father had one day left in a time machine with his best friend and never returned home.
"So that's our lives now," the eldest Brown child concluded as Emily landed the car before their destination. "I imagine if Dad would've been around, things might be a lot different for us all."
"No -- they would," Marty corrected. "And they will. Doc's sure we'll get home so none of this will happen, but I really hope he's wrong about it taking a month to do it."
"I think he might be wrong if we help you both out," Jules said. "He wasn't counting on that, was he?" Without waiting for Marty to confirm the answer, he continued. "Anyway, things should go pretty fast with us. I've got probably almost as much experience with building these sorts of things as Dad does, and Emily can do anything with computers."
The woman smiled as she shut her car off, clearly proud of her skills. "So long as he has a need for computer programs in the machine," she said. "Does he?"
Marty shrugged. "I have no idea. So far we've been putting together the hardware and stuff, not any software. But since the DeLorean had a lot of that in it, I wouldn't doubt it."
The three left the car and headed for the front door, all moving rather slowly for their own reasons. Marty suspected that Jules and Emily were probably nervous about seeing their father for the first time in almost forty years, and looking the same as he had the day he had left, no less, while they had aged into adulthood. Marty, however, was a whole lot more worried what Doc was going to do when he saw his adult children from now.
"Why don't you guys wait in the living room while I go out to the garage and get Doc?" he suggested, pausing with his thumb hovering over the plate that would let him in. "That way I can sort of prepare him for your being there."
"Sure," Jules said for the both of them. Marty went into the condo first, saw that the living room and kitchen were empty, then made sure his guests were comfortable on the couch before going to the garage.
Two hours had passed since Marty had looked in on Doc, but little had changed. The scientist had removed the back window of the car and was bent over the open space, working intently on installing something out of Marty's line of vision. The young man moved closer to try and get a better look. "How's it going?" he asked after a moment of silent observation.
Doc glanced up, clearly tired. "As well as it can," he said. "I was just about to wake you. Did you sleep well?"
Marty let out a silent sigh of relief, glad that the inventor hadn't tried anything like that earlier, when he'd been gone. "Fine," he said, which was the truth -- during those few hours he actually had slept, it had been like a rock.
"Good." Doc set down the drill in his hand and turned away from the car. "Do you want anything to eat before we get started?"
"No, I'm fine." That wasn't the entire truth -- he was starting to feel pretty hungry, actually -- but there were other things to worry about. "Listen, Doc, I need to tell you something...."
Doc headed over to the door that led into the condo. "All right," he said, reaching for the knob. "I was going to take a break anyway and have dinner--"
"No!" Marty exclaimed, realizing where, exactly, the inventor was headed. "You can't!"
Doc turned to regard him with a faintly puzzled look, his hand on the doorknob. "I can't what? Have dinner?"
"Uh, yeah," Marty said, wishing that he'd been able to slip between Doc and the door. He did what he could, moving to stand before the knob so that the scientist was reaching around him to get at it. Doc looked at him oddly, though whether it was from his not so subtle maneuver or his response, Marty wasn't sure.
"Why not? Did you make a mess in the kitchen?"
"No. I mean, yes. I--I spilled something all over the floor and I came down here 'cause I was wondering if you knew where a mop was."
Doc looked both skeptical and suspicious. "Marty, what's going on?" he asked.
"Nothing," Marty said, realizing as he spoke that he had just passed up the perfect chance to tell Doc what he had been planning to.
The scientist clearly didn't buy it, but he didn't press the issue, either. "Fine," he said, turning the door knob and slipping rather deftly past Marty. The young man blinked at the move and quickly followed right on the heels of Doc's long stride.
"Doc, listen, maybe you should know that --"
"Dad." The word, uttered softly by Jules, stopped Doc so dead in his tracks that Marty plowed right into his back. The inventor didn't even seem to notice the collision, however. Marty quickly caught his balance against the wall and peered past Doc, standing on the threshold of the brief hallway that led into the living room and kitchen, to see Emily and Jules on their feet, both of their eyes locked on their father from the past. Doc's eyes blinked at the sight of them, once, then widened hugely. He then turned sharply to look at Marty. The expression on his face and in his eyes -- a mixture of surprise, anger, and, worst of all, hurt -- cut the young man to the bone.
"Doc," Marty began, wanting to explain, but the inventor cut him off by pivoting sharply to the right and veering straight for the front door.
"Dad?" Jules asked, taking a step towards him. Doc didn't turn around or make any sign he'd heard.
"Daddy?" Emily asked, her voice both tentative and filled with the oddest note of longing. She received the same reaction as her brother.
"Doc!" Marty called out, taking several steps forward, after his friend. "Doc, wait!"
Perhaps Doc heard him approach, or knew what he was doing; at any rate he turned around as he grabbed his contemporary coat from a hook next to the door, threw Marty an arctic look that clearly told him to stay back and keep away, and opened the door. He left the condo without a word, the door shutting at his back with a hard note of finality.
"We should go after him," Emily said, taking a step forward, her eyes filling with tears.
Jules gently stopped his sister with a hand on her shoulder. "No," he said softly. "Dad'll come back on his own, when he's ready. In the meantime...." The older man looked at Marty, staring at the closed door with a rather stunned and pained look on his face. "Marty, why don't you show us what you've both been working on, so we can get an idea on what needs to be done?"
Tuesday, November 6, 2030
12:01 A.M.
Pleasant Hills Cemetery was adjacent to a park on the west end of Hill Valley, in a rather rural area even in 2030. Doc had found it only after consulting several maps at the library, and had provided careful directions to the cab driver to take him out here. The cabbie's attitude over such a job was clear -- he obviously thought his customer to be out of his mind to visit a graveyard so late at night, especially considering the snow starting to fall from the sky. Doc, however, tipped the man well when the destination was reached and told him that he'd pay him double so long as he stayed and waited while he did what he came to do. The cabbie, despite his feelings towards the scientist, agreed to the arrangement easily.
His ride taken care of, Doc took the paper from his pocket and squinted at the directions he'd scribbled down on it. The cemetery was rather large and sprawled, with most of the tombstones the flat kind set in the ground that one might accidentally step on. It made looking for specific graves all the more challenging, and the darkness made it doubly so. Doc, however, had purchased a small, powerful flashlight before coming out, anticipating such a thing, and, after finding a 3-D map at the gates of the cemetery, was able to orient himself and reached his destination after a brief hike.
The grave he found was set apart from others, under the bare branch canopy of a tree. From where he stood, the scientist could see the lights from downtown Hill Valley glittering, like a field of brightly colored stars. It wasn't a bad view; it was a pity the ones privy to it full time could not see it. Doc sighed, an utterly weary, depressed sound, then looked down at the marble headstone at his feet.
Here Lies
Loving Wife and Mother
Clara Elizabeth Brown
March 30, 1944 -- January 29, 2010
"Love is one of the answers humankind invented
to stare death in the face: time ceases to be a measure
and we can briefly know paradise."
Doc knelt before the grave and traced the carved letters of his wife's name with his fingers, his eyes drawn to the portrait of Clara etched into the stone near her name. He could tell in a glance that it had been posed for after his disappearance. She was smiling in the picture, but the expression was wistful, waiting, and the strain of his absence was clear from the lines of tension around her eyes and mouth.
"Oh, Clara," he whispered. "I'm so sorry."
Clara's portrait blurred before him as tears filled his eyes. Doc lowered his head and covered his eyes with his hand, too upset to do anything more than kneel there, pay silent respects to his wife of the future, and grieve for her untimely passing and the pain that she'd suffered when he hadn't come home.
He wasn't sure how much time passed before he became aware of a cold, dampness on the back of his neck -- snow, falling from above, Doc realized, raising his head. The sensation cleared his head a little, allowed him to get a grip on his emotions, and reminded him of why he was there in the first place.
"I'm sorry, Clara," he said quietly to the silent grave site, wiping the dampness from his cheeks before the harsh wind froze it to his skin. "You have my word that this will never happen, that you won't have to spend those years alone and waiting." Doc reached into the bag he had brought along and pulled out a bouquet of flowers he had picked up downtown -- a mixture of carnations, baby's breath, lavender lilies, lilacs, and white roses. He set it down at the base of the stone, kissed the tips of his fingers and touched her picture with them, then stood to leave.
The cab driver was still there when he returned to the front of the cemetery, a little more than half an hour after he had left, watching the small TV in his car. He didn't ask any questions about what the scientist had been doing, and took him to the condo without any attempt at conversation. Remembering his promise, Doc paid him double the fare and gave him another generous tip, hoping that the money would convince the cabbie to keep his mouth shut. The smile on the face of the man promised his cooperation in the matter.
As the vehicle pulled away and up into the night sky, Doc turned to eye the condo, not particularly looking forward to going inside. He knew Marty was probably still up and the idea of facing the young man's barrage of questions over where he had been wasn't something he was feeling up to right now. Nor did he feel like explaining the answers to those questions. Having taken a very long walk to downtown Hill Valley to calm himself after leaving the house, he'd had a late dinner, then visited the library to do his own research on his family -- or, specifically, where Clara had been buried. Once he had found that information, and stopped at a shop for the flowers and flashlight, he had caught a cab out to the cemetery to see her grave for himself, and hammer home the knowledge that he hadn't even wanted to know in the first place.
Facing Marty, however, was near the bottom of his concerns. If Jules and Emily were still in there, he wasn't sure he wanted to go in. Logically, he knew that the man and woman he had just glimpsed today were versions of his children that wouldn't be once he returned home, just as Clara wouldn't die in a fire out in the lab in 2010. But emotion wasn't swayed quite as easily. Doc sighed to himself as he finally headed for the front door. Lord knew why Marty had gone out and dragged them over -- frankly, he was still angry with the young man for doing that -- but he supposed that the matter couldn't be avoided forever.
The lights came on in the living room as Doc stepped into the condo, triggered by his movement as almost all of the lights in this place were. Synched with a clock, the glow from the lamps and the bulbs above was soft and came on gradually, over a minute, in an attempt to not stun the eyes that had just been outside in the dark. The first thing he noticed was that the ENIC was on, in the television mode, tuned to The Eighties Channel, according to the icon in the lower righthand corner of the screen. Doc looked at the consol for a minute, realized that the channel was showing the 1984 movie Ghostbusters, and opened his mouth to order the device to shut off when he noticed Marty sitting up on the couch, feet propped up on the coffee table, presumably watching the movie -- except that his eyes were closed and he was clearly asleep.
Secretly grateful (and, frankly, wondering how much rest his friend had even had earlier that day; for all he knew Marty hadn't even stayed in his room once Doc had returned to the garage, spending the day instead with Jules and Emily), Doc stepped over to the ENIC and touched the power button at the base of the screen. The device shut off with an abrupt silence that caused the scientist to jump in spite of himself. Glancing at Marty to see if the change in noise had woken him (and finding that, no, it hadn't; the young man hadn't even twitched), Doc headed for his own bedroom to get some long delayed sleep himself before he collapsed where he stood. A loud, metallic clatter from the direction of the garage stopped him after just two steps.
Doc slid his eyes back over to Marty, hoping against hope that it was him who had made the noise -- and never mind that it had come from completely the wrong direction. His friend was still in the same position he'd been in a minute ago, when the ENIC had been turned off. Damn. The inventor's eyes shifted in the direction of the garage and he knew he couldn't ignore the sound, no matter how much he wanted to right now. Although he had a feeling he knew what (or, rather, who) had made the noise, there was always the possibility of a break-in. And Doc didn't care to think what might happen should someone make off with pieces or plans of the time machine. Drawing a deep breath to steady himself, the scientist headed for the garage door, bracing himself for what he was sure he'd find on the other side of it.
When he reached it seconds later, Doc cracked the door open slowly a few inches, peeking inside, hopefully unnoticed to give him the chance to access the situation. Although he saw no one from the angle he was at, he did hear voices, clearly.
"Need any help, Jules, before you break something?" a voice that was familiar, foreign, and female asked rather dryly.
"I'm fine, Em. It's not my fault that Dad's so disorganized with his tools. Hard to believe, since I think this kit is brand new, too. Anyway, Marty didn't come running, so I doubt very much that anyone in adjacent units would be bothered by our work."
"You mean your noise." There was a long pause. "If Marty hasn't come back down, it must mean that Daddy is still out there. What if he doesn't come back?"
There was a soft snort. "Highly unlikely. He wouldn't leave Marty alone back here too long. And Dad wanted to get home as much, if not more, than him." There was a sigh. "I guess I'll go up and see how things are, though, and get some coffee. Do you want any?"
"You know caffeine gives me anxiety attacks. But if there's real juice -- not that stale stuff from a hyde mix -- in the fridge, I'll have some."
Before Doc could either step back or step forward, the doorknob was yanked from his grasp and he found himself face to face with a clearly startled fifty-four-year-old Jules. "Dad!" his oldest son gasped out.
"Hello, Jules," Doc said softly. He looked beyond the man to his daughter, seated at the worktable before a laptop computer and staring at him with a nearly identical expression of surprise on her face. "Hello, Emily."
Silence hung in the air, a weighted tension that lasted at least a full minute before Jules broke it, tentatively. "Are you all right?"
"I've been better," Doc said after a moment, honestly. "What are you both doing here?"
"Marty thought you might need some help building the new time machine," Jules explained. "He was concerned that with the drive you have, you'd burn yourself out and make a potentially fatal error that you wouldn't catch."
Doc frowned, though he supposed he could understand Marty's worry. The idea of sleeping even an hour, no matter how exhausted he was, gave him horrible prickles of guilt. As irrational as it might've been, the longer it took to build the time machine, the more he felt his family suffered.
"I see," he said, flicking his eyes away from Jules to take in the rest of the garage. A few of the various half-constructed devices scattered about looked as if they'd been worked on, more whole than he remembered them being before he'd left. And the idea that Marty could've done such work was too farfetched for the scientist to believe. "How do you know what I was doing?" Doc asked, feeling it a very valid concern.
Jules smiled. "Your schematics and blueprints that you'd made for everything," he said. "They may have been a little sloppy, but I could read them and, anyway, I've built a time machine, too." There was a clear note of pride in the words.
Doc wasn't terribly surprised to hear that, as Jules had talked about creating his own machine ever since he had grasped what his father had succeeded in doing, once before his birth and again when he had been seven and ten. "When?" he asked.
"2020. July twenty-fifth, to be exact." Jules' smile faded. "It was destroyed less than a year later, when I'd only done a couple basic test trips on it. Another fire in the lab. All my plans were lost, too, so I just decided to let it go. But I still remember how to do this sort of thing."
Doc supposed his skills were suitable enough without constant supervision, so long as he had indeed stuck to the plans. He headed over to the table to take a look at what had been done in his absence. As he was squinting at the half assembled circuits of the time circuit display, Emily spoke up for the first time.
"Are you really our father?" she asked, sounding almost doubtful. "You seem... different than I remember. Not as tall."
Doc looked up from his examination to get his first good look at the woman whom he had last seen at the age of three. She looked so much like Clara at first glance that it brought a lump to his throat, but there were definite flickers of influence from his side of the family. The shape of her face and her build was just like his mother's, and the blue of the eyes had also been a legacy from the grandmother she would never meet. They were still as large and as round in her face as they had been the last time he had seen her, and it made her look much younger than her physical age, a great deal more innocent and child-like than most women in their early forties. But, looking deeper into the eyes that reminded him a little of both Verne and his mother, he saw that the it was an illusion, that her life experiences had been a great deal harsher, and she was now wise to the darker sides of the world.
"I suppose I might," he said in response to her comment, "since you haven't seen me since you were about three-and-a-half. In my memory, my parents seemed to shrink as I got older -- but it was just me who changed in size, not them."
Emily smiled faintly, shyly. "I don't remember too much about you, Daddy. But Mom showed me as many pictures as we had." She paused, then added softly, "You look so much the same, it's like I'm staring at a ghost."
"Remember, Em, time travel can do this sort of thing," Jules said. "And this is our father as he was in May of 1991. Not as he would be now, at the age of... wow, I guess it would be a hundred-and-twenty-one." Jules shook his head. "No reason you wouldn't still be alive now," he hastened to add as Doc started to get a little worried at the note of amazement in his son's voice as he quoted his age. "There are some a hundred-and-thirty-year-olds now. Not many, but they aged naturally until the first rejuvs started showing up around 2010. They didn't have help like I know you've had at a younger age. And they can't go ahead a bit and get a better rejuv."
"I know," Doc said easily, glad to hear that that aspect of the future hadn't changed. He looked back at the assembling Jules had done and grunted his approval of the work. "It looks like you followed the instructions to the letter."
Jules nodded once, modestly. "That was the goal," he said. "With Emily and I helping out, now, you can get some rest without worrying about falling behind. Instead, you'll finish ahead of your schedule."
"But I don't have everything drafted out, yet...."
Emily clicked her tongue. "Oh, Daddy, there's plenty to keep us busy 'til then," she said. "Jules' machine was almost exactly like yours, anyway. What I need to know is what kind of software you'd like," she added, nodding to the screen of the laptop, which Doc assumed was hers. "I wrote almost all of the programs for Jules' machine, but I don't know what kind of specs you want. I drafted a couple while we were waiting for you, if you want to take a look."
Doc looked at his daughter, amazed. The woman smiled at his expression. "Does this shock you? One of the few memories I do have of you is you getting mad at me when I would try to play with your computer in the lab without permission."
Such an occurrence had happened more than once already, Doc remembered. Keeping Emily away from the computer in the lab was like keeping two opposite magnets from slamming into each other. He had wondered if it had been a phase, however, and was pleasantly surprised that it apparently wasn't, but instead was one of the first signs of what would be an obvious love and talent. He would have to remember that when he got back home and think strongly about buying his daughter her own computer when she got a little older. "I'm not surprised, exactly," he admitted. "I take it you are good at this?"
"So good that she couldn't find a job for years," Jules said, the comment made as a statement of fact, not as an insult. Emily frowned at her oldest brother.
"If Daddy hadn't left when he did, that might not have happened," she said. "Anyway, you weren't perfect, either."
"I don't want to hear about it," Doc said, holding up his hand to ward off whatever news his children might mention. "Is Verne here for this, too? Or did Marty only fetch the technologically competent in my family?"
Emily and Jules looked at each other for a moment, an awkward silence between them. Jules was the one who broke the news, his voice soft. "Dad, I don't know how to tell you this, but Verne died two years after Mom, in an auto accident in Los Angelas."
Doc closed his eyes for a moment, a new ache spreading in his chest. He drew in a breath slowly, painfully. "Oh, Lord, no...."
"It won't happen once you go back, though," Emily said earnestly. "Like Mom. I just have a feeling. Verne only moved to L.A. after college because he wanted to get away from all the gossip about your disappearance and make a fresh start. I don't think he would have left if you were still around, and if he hadn't been on the freeway when he was, he wouldn't have been hit."
"Perhaps," Doc allowed, still shaken from the news.
"I think Em is right, Dad," Jules said, matter-of-factly. "Verne just saw no point in sticking around Hill Valley, since everyone immediately pegged him as your son before anything else. And it was crimping his work; he was having trouble finding jobs. His new wife was a teacher and had a nice offer in Hill Valley after her graduation, but they decided to leave regardless."
Doc took a moment to work through the news, then sighed. "I don't suppose I can do a thing about it now. And you might very well be right, that my returning home the day I left and not disappearing for almost forty years will change that scenario. I suppose time will tell."
"Speaking of time, it's pretty late," Jules said, looking pointedly at the clock. "Why don't you and Marty go to bed, at least for a few hours? Emily and I can keep things progressing down here while you're gone."
Doc looked at the clock himself, which told him it was now a quarter after three in the morning, and accepted the suggestion with a weary nod. "You're right. Marty had fallen asleep watching TV before I even came in, and I was actually on my way to my room when I heard noises from down here and wanted to make sure we weren't being burglarized."
"Then do what you were going to do in the first place," Jules said. "Emily and I are wide awake and as eager to finish this new machine as you are. If you want us to get either or both of you up at a specific time, we will, but I think you should at least have a few hours of rest. You'll feel better for it."
"If I can sleep," Doc said, the news about Verne now gnawing at him. "We'll see, I suppose. And if you have any questions about the plans or whatnot, please don't hesitate to wake me up and ask. I'd rather have that than something put together wrong or different than I need."
"No problem," Jules agreed as Emily nodded. "But rest easy, please -- we've got this under control."
The scientist hesitated at the threshold of the door a moment, watching his children return to their projects, then let them be and continued to his room, knowing for certain that they hadn't been lying. They weren't going to do anything to hinder the progress or the function of the new time machine. Their futures were as much wrapped in it as his own, if not more.
Tuesday, November 6, 2030
6:11 A.M.
The hollow, ceramic clatter of something startled him awake. Blinking in the semidarkness, Marty wasn't sure where he was at first. His surroundings came into focus slowly, reluctantly, and it took his groggy brain a good minute before it recognized that he was in the living room of the condo, sitting up on the couch. Vaguely, Marty remembered watching TV earlier while waiting up for Doc to return -- and, against his wishes, he had apparently fallen asleep.
There was another sound from nearby, a kind of thud that a full cup or dish usually made when it was set down. Marty turned his head to see what was going on -- and groaned aloud at the deep ache in the back of his neck, no doubt brought about from sleeping on it at a funny angle.
"Are you okay?" a voice asked softly, concerned. Marty gritted his teeth against the discomfort and turned his head the rest of the way to see Jules standing at the kitchen counter, a steaming mug of something in one hand.
"I'm fine," Marty muttered, rather hoarsely. He cleared his throat before continuing. "Just sore from sleeping sitting up. How long was I out?"
Jules glanced at the clock on the weird device that was a combo microwave, oven, toaster, and broiler. "It's a little after six in the morning, now, and you came up here around midnight, if I remember correctly."
Marty thought a moment as he tentatively rubbed the back of his neck. He knew that he hadn't fallen asleep right away; the last time he remembered seeing a clock, it had been after one in the morning. Meaning.... "So I only got about five hours," he realized with a yawn. "Perfect."
"Get more if you want," Jules said, taking a sip from his mug. "Dad returned a little before three," he said before Marty could even ask, "and Emily and I convinced him to go to bed, finally. We've been keeping things on track while you've both been asleep."
Marty thought about the offer for a minute, then shook his head, wincing as it caused dull spikes of pain to snake down his neck and into his shoulders. "I think I'll skip it," he said. "So far I've been lucky not to have any nightmares about the fun twists I've seen here, probably because I'm not asleep long enough for it to happen. And when I have been sleeping, I'm so tired that I'm not even trying when it happens."
"You shouldn't keep this up for much longer," Jules warned, his tone full of disapproval. "If you've indeed just had mono, there's a chance you could relapse if you wear your body out again. Even with the medication they gave you."
Marty got to his feet, slowly and stiffly. "I'll be fine," he said, not worried. "My neck is killing me, though...."
"Take a hot shower or bath, or use a Instaheat pad, if there's one around," Jules said. "That should help. And if there's some ibuprofen in the bathroom, I'd take a couple of those."
Marty looked at Doc's son with both amusement and puzzlement. "For another Doc, you sure seem to know a lot about health," he said. "Don't tell me you're a hypochondriac...."
Jules smiled faintly, unoffended. "No," he said. "I just have an interest in medicine... or have since I was about thirteen or fourteen and had a biology teacher who used to be a doctor in an emergency room. Deborah Gettling was an excellent inspiration and she really had a profound influence on me."
This was major news to Marty, who remembered Jules not mentioning anything like this once over the last couple years. He stared at the older man in surprise, seeing him in a new light. "Really? Wow, I had no idea! How come you chose physics over medicine?"
The question clearly made the older man uncomfortable. He took a long drink from his mug. "There were reasons," he said vaguely. "If you want, Emily and I can use your hands in the garage. After your shower and breakfast, of course."
"Ah, sure," Marty agreed, a little puzzled by the abrupt change in subject. Jules left the kitchen to return to the garage and Marty headed into the bathroom, hoping that a hot shower would indeed ease the ache in his neck. It ended up helping, a little, but Marty thought that a couple Advil would help even more, and he took those after getting out of the shower. A half hour later, in clean clothes, his hair still damp from the shower, and feeling considerably more awake, Marty stopped in the kitchen, grabbed a muffin and a glass of orange juice, then went on to the garage to see what he could do.
He found Emily and Jules busy in opposite corners of the room, the latter working on assembling the various devices that would, together, create a time machine, and the former bent over her computer and typing rapidly. Neither one noticed Marty until he spoke up.
"Who can I help?" he asked.
Jules was the one who took him up on the offer, as Emily was busy writing computer programs for the machine and didn't really need any assistance. Since writing computer programs was more of a mystery to Marty than the circuit boards and hardware that he could physically touch, he didn't argue. After an hour of working in relative silence, he excused himself to go into the condo and search for something, anything, that could play music. When he returned empty-handed, and Emily heard what he was trying to do, she simply tapped into a local radio station on her computer and piped music in that way. Marty was stunned that her machine could do that, but he was dragged away from asking any questions about it by a new worry that just occurred to him.
"Hey, isn't today a weekday?" he asked, unable to know for sure, what with all of the crazy hours he'd been keeping since they got here.
Both Emily and Jules confirmed his guess with a nod. "It's Tuesday, November sixth, 2030," Jules specified. "Why?"
"Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you guys have to be working at jobs?"
"I'm on sabbatical right now," Jules said. "I took the whole year off to pursue private projects."
"And I can do my job by telecommuting, through this computer right here, right now," Emily said. "Thank God this condo is wired with FOs. A slow DSL or Ethernet connection would make that almost impossible."
Marty had no idea what some of the words or letters she uttered meant, but he got the gist of what she was saying. "Well, that's good, then," he said, relieved that he wasn't going to create problems at either of their jobs for them. He went back to work with helping Jules, feeling better with the steady stream of music, all from the 1970s, 80's, and 90's, according to the DJ. But even with two extra people helping him and Doc out, he was dismayed that they weren't making faster progress.
Such disappointment was clear on Doc's face, when he finally joined them around noon, but he didn't voice those feelings. Jules, who was beginning to look rather weary now, looked up at the sound of the elder scientist's entrance and smiled, pleased. "You got some sleep," he said, the fact obvious. Marty thought Doc looked a lot better for it, much sharper. Even his movements were more rapid and precise.
Doc nodded once. "What have you gotten done?" he asked.
Jules gave him the report, then turned things over to Emily, who wanted to demonstrate some of the programs she had written to her father. As Doc leaned over to see the screen of her laptop, Marty excused himself to grab a soda from upstairs and take a moment to wonder if he should speak to Doc about last night alone or before his kids. He finally decided on alone and returned to the garage, where Doc was clearly impressed with Emily's work.
"I must admit I never thought about that," he said to his beaming daughter. "But I like it, and I think we should use it."
"Thanks, Daddy," Emily said, clearly happy with the praise.
"You know, Dad," Jules said, looking up from the connection he was working on, as Marty passed him requested tools, "there's a lot of things we can build into this machine that will add to its functions or security. What about a better display for the destination times and the like? And did you think about putting in Identipad locks, for example? They're pretty common now with cars, so you don't need keys anymore and it prevents them from being stolen or broken into."
"Perhaps so," Doc said, "but using too many devices from the future has the potential to create some problems. Because this is a time that hasn't happened yet and is in a form of flux, there is always the possibility that something could be changed between 1991 and 2030 that prevents one of the things from being invented, or postpones its creation, or in some way changes its function."
Marty, although he'd once had the decidedly weird experience of seeing such a thing happen, was skeptical. "I dunno, Doc," he said. "I know you've used parts from the future before -- like the hover conversion and Mr. Fusion and the holographic technology -- and they never were erased from existence or anything...."
"But, with the exception of Mr. Fusion, none were critical to the actual function of time travel. And if worst came to worst with the fusion reactor, I knew that there were ways to get around it."
"Installing Identipad locks in the car won't interfere with the time travel function," Jules said. "And I really don't believe that theory, anyway. If that was true, some of those alternate realities that you both visited -- and the ones I saw, too -- would have erased the time machine itself from existence. But it never happened."
"No person was ever erased from existence -- although it was close at points -- but that doesn't mean it wouldn't have happened," Doc argued.
"The odds are really against the time machine failing before we correct an error, though, Doc," Marty said. "I think you should take advantage of some of this future stuff. 'Cause if you're worried about that, why are we using a car that hasn't been made yet, in '91?"
Marty felt perversely pleased that this question silenced his friend and clearly gave Doc something to think about. At length, he nodded. "You're right. Okay, Jules, I guess the print locks would be a good idea, and I suppose there's no harm in using a plasma screen to replace the digital readouts of the time display. It would certainly be a more flexible feature."
Those decisions made, the group resumed working. When, around six that evening, Doc went into the kitchen to have a snack, Marty followed him, deciding that it was time for their "talk." The young man found his friend rummaging around in the refrigerator with a frown.
"Looks like we'll have to order more groceries," he muttered, half to himself.
"Won't we have to get some of that stuff that you guys are gonna add to the machine, now, anyway?" Marty asked.
Doc straightened up and closed the fridge. "Yes, but we can have them delivered, unless Jules or Emily want to go out. We don't have a car and I'm getting a little tired of taking taxis."
Marty understood. It was a real pain not having wheels at easy disposal. He hadn't been without his own car since... well, since before he changed history in 1985 and prevented his parents from becoming the losers that they had been for the first seventeen years of his life. "Yeah," he said. "Listen, Doc... are you mad at me, still? For bringing them here? I only did it 'cause I didn't want you to wear yourself out until you collapsed, and I knew they'd want to help out and see you, and this way we can go home sooner, anyway. They know what they're doing, a lot more than even I thought. I didn't bring them over here to hurt you or make you face a future you didn't want to. I swear. I guess I can respect that you don't want to know things, and I didn't do it to be smart or an ass." He paused. "And I'm really sorry if this hurt you."
Doc studied him for a long moment, his face expressionless and impassive. "I was furious at you last night," he said at length.
Marty zeroed in on the past tense of Doc's statement, cautiously hopeful. "I'm not surprised," he said, remembering with a wince the way the inventor had left the condo. "But are you now, still?"
"Not furious, no," the inventor said as he opened a couple of the kitchen's cabinets, searching, presumably, for something to eat. "Jules explained to me last night why you had done what you did. And getting about eight hours of sleep earlier helped as well. But, Marty, in the future, I would prefer that you discuss such moves with me before you do them."
"I tried," Marty said, honestly. "You were set on doing this alone, and even more about not knowing anything else about your family's future."
Doc didn't bother to deny it. "Be that as it may, no more 'surprises,' okay?"
Marty smiled, relieved that his friend wasn't going to disown him. "No problem," he said earnestly. "I think we've had enough shocks this week to last us a lifetime."
* * *
The night wore on, in blurs of coffee breaks, snacking on whatever foods could be made quickly (Emily had decided she could be spared to make a run to the store for both new machine parts and food), assembling circuits, and the like. Doc, who discovered that he'd actually had the most sleep of everyone during the night, found himself functioning at near peak levels. But he saw the stress and the hard work wear down Marty, Jules, and Emily. They all denied they needed breaks, however, and, knowing that each pair of hands reduced the time it took before the modified Aerovette would be complete, Doc didn't fight them too hard on it.
But shortly after midnight, when Marty got hurt, he began to regret that attitude.
The accident occurred as the young man was holding in place a panel of wires and circuits as Jules welded it onto the rear bank collected on the back of the Aerovette. When Jules had paused for a moment to snip free a dangling wire with a small, finger-sized laser cutter, Marty's grip had slipped and the top of his hand fell into the beam as he tried to catch what was falling from his hand. The cry of pain he let out startled both Doc and Emily, who were busy working on the new time machine's computer database, compiling programs and running them through a variety of tests. Emily jerked her hand back, her elbow slamming into the half filled bottle of water at her side, knocking it over and splashing liquid all over spare parts and tools that were stacked on the floor.
"Damn!" Marty gasped, his voice cracking in pain. He abandoned trying to get a better grip on the panel in favor of slamming his right hand on top of his injured left, and drawing it in to his chest. The panels crashed to the cement floor of the garage, components snapping off. Jules looked at it numbly for a moment, the laser cutter still on and in hand, before he snapped his attention to a very pale Marty.
"What happened?" Doc demanded, jumping up from his chair to get a closer look.
"Marty's hand got in the way of the laser," Jules said, oddly calm. He switched the device off and slipped it into his pocket before reaching for the injured Marty, who looked even more pale at the mention of the word laser.
"Oh my God, did you cut off part of my hand? Like in Star Wars?" He flinched away from Jules as Doc finally reached their sides. Rather than join them, Emily hurried out of the garage and into the condo, perhaps to get something to clean up the water she had spilled.
Jules wasn't able to prevent the smile from crossing his face at Marty's question. "I don't think so! Let me see it, Marty."
Marty hesitated a moment, then held out the wounded hand for all to see. Doc sucked in a breath through his teeth at the nasty purple streak etched across the top of the injured skin. The mark ran from the bottom of his pinky to almost the base of his thumb. "It hurts like hell," Marty moaned, grimacing as he looked at the wound.
"Burned," Doc said aloud. "Not cut. How strong was the laser, Jules?"
"Enough to sever through almost anything," the man admitted. "I had it on a mild setting, however." Jules gently led Marty over to one of the worktables, where there were lamps that would allow for a better look at the wound. After a brief examination, the older man said, "It doesn't look that bad -- or, rather, it looks worse than it is. I don't think it's deep enough to cause major tissue or internal damage or we'd see more discoloration than there is."
Marty didn't look very relieved. "Yeah, but the whole top of my hand is burning," he said. "And, Christ, is this gonna leave a scar?"
"Not really," Jules said. "I'll bet that this place has a first aid kit and that should have some salves we can apply to generate healing and reduce the pain. You might end up with a scar, but it shouldn't be very noticeable -- faint, at the worst."
Emily ran back into the garage, breathless, with a small square box in hand. "I found a first aid kit in the bathroom," she reported, plunking it down on the table with impeccable timing. Doc watched his son as he opened the kit and found what he needed, slightly amazed at his deftness and the way he expertly handled Marty's wound.
"You're quite good at that," he commented as Jules applied the salve to the hand. "Did you take a first aid course recently?"
Jules didn't look up. "Not exactly," he said. Marty, remaining almost motionless as Jules worked, tilted his head enough to address the younger male Brown.
"You know a lot about medicine, Jules," he said. "I'm surprised you didn't do this instead, or with the physics thing."
Jules froze for a second at the words, the pause so quick that it almost got by Doc -- almost. He might have dismissed it had the pause not been accompanied by a flash of annoyance or frustration that darted across his face at the same moment. "I think you should take a break now, Marty," he said as he tore open a sterilized bandage. "The wound probably won't stop hurting for a couple hours -- though Tylenol or something will help -- and even if it doesn't hurt so long, you might find that the hand will move a little stiffly for a few hours, a side effect from the salve."
Marty did not look excited by anything the man had said. "Wonderful," he sighed, frustrated. "So what can I do?"
"Sleep while you can," Doc said. "And don't even try to deny you're not tired and won't be able to."
Marty didn't. Jules finished up his work on the hand, then turned his attention to cleaning up and reassembling the panel the young man had dropped. Doc collected the first aid kit and followed Marty into the condo, partially to make sure that his friend would indeed lie down in his room and not take another field trip outside. Marty didn't seem to notice or care about Doc's ulterior motives.
"You know, Doc, something's up with Jules," he said softly as they left the brief hallway from the garage and entered the living room.
"What makes you say that?" Doc asked.
"He knows a lot about medicine and health, considering," Marty said. "And whenever you bring that up, he changes the subject or never answers your questions."
Doc remembered Jules' reaction minutes ago in the garage and conceded. "Perhaps, but that doesn't mean anything," he said.
"Doesn't it?" Marty went into the bathroom and opened up the medicine cabinet, rummaging around. "Jules has become just like you here, Doc. Hell, he even built a time machine. But I don't think he's happy at all, and not just 'cause you vanished and all that other stuff. You know what I think?"
"I suppose you'll tell me anyway," Doc said, watching him from the doorway of the bathroom.
Marty found a bottle of a prescription-strength painkillers, a brand that Doc didn't recognize, and popped the lid open with his uninjured right hand. "I think that, deep down, Jules wanted to be a medical doc. And didn't for some reason. Maybe 'cause you disappeared when you did and he felt that he had to carry on the family legacy. I dunno. But I find it kinda interesting that he said he'd been interested in medicine since he was thirteen or fourteen from an inspirational teacher... and he never said anything, did he?"
Doc thought about Marty's words for a long moment. So far as he remembered, Jules had never mentioned a teacher at those ages whom he had found unusually interesting, nor did he remember his son displaying any interest in medical sciences. But he did remember Jules' behavior of the recent month, the clear rebelling and scorn he was displaying, particularly to his father. A glimmer of a theory started to form, but the entire picture wasn't quite there.
"None of this could be connected," Doc said as Marty swallowed the pills with a glass of tapwater. "And, anyway, why would Jules do something he didn't want to? Clara and I have told our children countless times that they can make their futures and do anything if they apply themselves and put their minds to it."
Marty shrugged as he set the glass back down on the countertop. "Jules can get some weird ideas sometimes," he said, lowering his voice a little. "Remember the first time he really met me, and had that crazy idea that when you guys moved to the future, I was going to take his place in your family?"
"Marty, he was only nine, then...."
Marty shrugged. "My point is, he could've gotten another weird idea stuck in his head." He stopped talking as they heard the garage door open and close and footsteps head into the condo. "I just think you should talk to him, Doc," he concluded in a near whisper. "If he did get into something he didn't want to, and you know it, maybe you can make sure that doesn't happen once you get back."
That said, Marty scooted past him, out of the bathroom and into his room. "Get me if you need me," he said before closing the door.
Doc stood where he was a moment, thinking, then left the small corridor and went back into the family room. Jules was in the kitchen, pouring himself another cup of coffee, his back to his father. If he was going to indeed ask him anything, now would be the perfect time, Doc realized.
"Taking a break?" he asked his son. Jules set the pot down and turned around, mildly startled.
"I think at this point I'm pumping coffee through my veins, not blood," he said, rubbing his eyes. "Did Marty go to bed?"
"Unless he's planning another trip out and going to sneak out of the window, I believe so." Doc paused a moment, wondering how to broach what he wanted to talk about, then decided a direct way would be best. "Sit down, Jules, I want to talk to you."
Jules' brown eyes blinked, surprised. "All right," he said, heading for the kitchen table. "I'm not in trouble, am I?"
"No, nothing of the sort." Doc sat across from his son, then came out and said it. "You never wanted to be like me, did you?"
Jules stared at him, his cup of coffee paused halfway to his mouth. "What?"
"Do you remember our last conversation before I left?" Doc asked.
There was an odd sort of sullenness that crossed his son's face, making him look much younger than his years, then. "Of course," he said softly.
"Correct me if my impressions of the encounter are wrong, but during that conversation -- during the months prior to my departure -- you had been carefully separating yourself, distinguishing yourself, away from me. And going out of your way to do it, too, to the point that you were making some very stupid choices."
"Typical teenage rebellion," Jules said. "What child doesn't react in similar ways?"
Doc looked at him. "Why didn't you tell me that you became interested in medical sciences when you were thirteen or fourteen?"
Jules calmly sipped from his cup, then set it down. "I didn't?" he said innocently -- too innocently.
Doc sighed. "Marty told me," he said. "And, no, you never once mentioned it. Is that true, Jules?"
Jules pinched his mouth together, as if he had tasted something sour, then shrugged and relaxed the expression. "Yes, I suppose it is."
"Why didn't you say anything? Or pursue the interest?"
Jules shrugged again. "I had other responsibilities," he said.
"Which were what? To be like me? I never expected you to do that, Jules. From the cradle you acted as you did."
"Yes -- because I was the oldest son in our family and it was my responsibility to continue the family legacy."
Doc frowned. "When on earth did I ever give you that impression?"
His son traced his fingers around the curve of the handle. "It was just common knowledge when I was growing up," he said simply. "And far be it from me to shirk my responsibilities. I had the intelligence to do what you had done before and it would've been a shame not to."
Something finally clicked with Doc, brought about by the words when I was growing up, and suddenly he saw years of his son's behavior explained with crystal clarity. "Jules," he said, quietly, "the values and attitudes you may have witnessed in the Nineteenth Century were not necessarily held by your mother and me. While it was almost expected then that sons would go into family businesses and trades, Clara and I never for a moment planned that for any of our children."
Jules raised an eyebrow, skeptical. "I don't know if I believe that," he said.
"Well, believe it. Great Scott, are you telling me that you thought you had to do exactly what I had done, like it or not, because you thought your mother and I wanted that?"
"You never told me otherwise."
"Of course we did! We told you and Verne and even Emily, now, that you are free to do what you want, that you can do anything you want, and that anything can be overcome if you put your mind to it! We never once said, 'Jules, you have to be exactly like your father, like it or not.'"
"Not in so ma0ny words..." Jules hedged.
Doc leaned forward to look him square in the eyes. "No, not at all," he said sincerely and seriously. "You were reading into things the wrong way. And if this idea got into your head at a very young age, I'm not surprised that you were putting that sort of spin on everything."
"So, you're telling me that if I went up to you and told you I wanted to be a doctor -- not a doctor of science but a doctor of medicine -- you wouldn't be upset?" There was an odd tone that Doc couldn't quite figure out in Jules' voice as he asked the question. But the scientist answered without the slightest bit of hesitation.
"Absolutely and positively not. You could tell us that you wanted to collect garbage for a living and, so long as you were truly happy with it, we would support you." The inventor sighed heavily. "Why didn't you ever talk about this with us?"
"I always thought that if I was just imagining that stuff, that you and Mom would say something. Instead, every time I brought home straight A's, every time I made something that worked, every time I demonstrated knowledge about electronics or science, you were both so proud."
"What did you expect us to be? Mad? Disappointed? Those are good things, Jules. And, Lord, we're not mind readers. If you weren't comfortable with what you were doing, it's your responsibility to tell us. And even when we did ask you how you were doing and whatnot, you wouldn't tell us anything!"
"What about your father?" Jules asked, frowning.
Doc blinked as he tried to twist his mind to the seemingly random topic change. "My father?" he echoed.
"Yes. I remember you mentioned once how he was one of the main doctors in Hill Valley when you were growing up and that he was disappointed that you didn't want to do what he did."
Doc thought about that a moment, tapping a finger on the tabletop. "Maybe so," he agreed. "But he certainly didn't disown me or cut me off from the family -- which, if you think we'd that do to you, makes you as crazy as everyone says I am. And just because my father reacted the way he did is not an indication that I would be the same way. Jules, I wish you would have said something...."
A ghost of a smile played on his son's lips. "You can," he said. "When you go back, talk to me. Part of the reason I was such a jerk then was because I wanted to do what I wanted to -- which was to pursue a career in medicine, particularly emergency medicine -- and, at the same time, I felt that I couldn't because of you and Mom. When you disappeared, I felt that basically sealed my fate. Now, I had to be another Dr. Brown, PhD, to continue what you could not. Mom had to deal with enough back then and I didn't want to lay another problem on her."
"And the smoking? And the sneaking out? And the dropped grades? None of that would do you any good in the future, Jules."
The brown eyes across the table blinked. "I know that now," he said. "Adult perspectives can be wonderful things. But at the time I was just so angry and frustrated...."
"Really? I didn't notice." Doc's eyes narrowed as he thought. "But if I was to talk to you about this back then, would you even listen?"
Jules picked up his cup and took a drink as he pondered that. "You're stubborn, Dad," he said. "If I don't, keep hammering away. But I think the shock alone of you telling me everything you just did -- as well as the stuff I told you about my own thoughts and feelings -- will be enough. And if I don't listen, there are other things you can do...."
There was a rather suggestive tone to his voice, but Doc didn't quite catch what he wasn't saying. "Such as?"
"Bring me here and let me give myself a little talking to. I guarantee you, that will make an impression." Jules smiled mischievously for a moment, then the smile faded and he sighed heavily. "Make me listen, Dad," he said softly. "I know you can. If nothing else comes out of your being here and all the terrible things you've had to deal with in the last few days, know that telling me what's what will definitely improve my future. And you should be glad for that."
Wednesday, November 7, 2030
3:33 A.M.
Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep--
A shrill, persistent sound nudged its way into Marty's consciousness, a most rude and unpleasant sound that also sounded all too familiar. He half grunted, half groaned, and reached out to slam off the alarm clock that was informing him it was now time to get up and go to work. His hand fell straight through air, though, and so caught off balance was he that Marty knocked himself off the bed and to the floor. Hitting the carpet woke him up enough that he realized that he was not at home, and that the annoying noise was not coming from an alarm clock.
"What the hell?" he mumbled, sitting up, just as he heard a sharp hiss from above. A second later, water -- cold water -- gushed down from above. Marty gasped at the unexpected shock, leaping to his feet and wondering if this was some sort of bizarre, super realistic dream. He took a step forward, toward the crack of light that indicated the bottom of the closed door, only to find himself back on the floor a second later, having tripped over an unseen suitcase from when he and Doc had left the hospital, an incident that seemed a million years ago. Cursing softly, trying to ignore his increasingly wet clothes and his hand, which was aching now from the unanticipated falls, Marty climbed to his feet again and threw open his door, ready to seriously kill someone if this was a joke.
Clearly, it wasn't. The noise was out here, too, so loud that he wondered if he'd have any hearing left whenever the thing shut off. Water was gushing from the ceiling in the living room and kitchen area, too, emerging from millions of tiny holes set in the ceiling that Marty hadn't really noticed before. He heard voices shouting from the garage and made a beeline in that direction, nearly falling again as he cut through the kitchen and skidded on the wet floor tiles.
"... not notice that?!" he heard Doc shouting from just outside the door, over the din of the beeping.
"Sorry, I just didn't!" Jules shot back immediately. "I haven't slept in approximately forty-three hours, now!"
"And whose fault is that?" Doc called back.
Marty burst into the garage, his mouth already open to demand an explanation about what was going on -- when all the air he drew in to yell was projected out in a gasp instead. The entire top of the main worktable was in flames. Emily and Doc were both trying to snuff out the fire with a pair of small fire extinguishers while Jules was frantically trying to pull things away from the heat and the fire so as to not ruin anything. The water was coming down out here, too, Marty noticed in a rather offhanded manner, though he doubted the trio in the garage was even aware of it.
"What happened?" Marty shouted, not sure if he should stay where he was, help out in some way, or call 911 -- or whatever was the equivalent here.
Rather than take the time to answer Marty's question, Doc barked an order, instead: "Marty, close the Aerovette doors, now!"
Marty hustled over to do what he was asked, slamming both of the doors shut, then found a tarp and covered the rear of the car, still open to the water gushing down. After a few more minutes of struggle, Emily and Doc got the upper hand on the blaze and snuffed it out. By that time, the garage was filled with black, acrid smoke and the dizzying stink of fried electronics.
"What happened?" Marty asked again when the fire was out, coughing hard as his eyes watered against the smoke.
Doc answered as Jules opened the garage door to air out the room. "Jules made a poor connection and shorted out a circuitboard when we ran it through a test, it fried Emily's computer, and the sparks didn't mix well with the puddle of water the plug was sitting in."
"I'm sorry, Daddy," Emily said, her voice sounding meek. "I forgot about the water I spilled earlier...."
Doc let out a sigh that turned into a cough halfway. Once the garage door was open, Jules darted over to a small metal box mounted near the door, pried it open, and pulled a few choice wires. The indoor rain shower stopped and alarm abruptly silenced, though Marty's ears continued to ring a little.
"Do you want me to buzz the fire department and tell them we have things under control?" Emily asked after a moment of blessed silence was enjoyed. "They'd be on their way over, now."
"Please," Doc said softly. He set down the fire extinguisher in his hand and walked outside to the driveway. Marty followed him, the heavy burned electronics smell already giving him a serious headache. He found his friend, soaked to the skin and covered in blackened smoke and soot, staring out into the dark street, arms folded across his chest. Almost as soon as Marty stepped outside, he regretted it. There were a couple inches of snow on the ground and, though the sky above was currently clear, a very uncomfortable wind was gusting, made all the more uncomfortable from being in wet clothes. Nevertheless, he didn't turn back.
"Are you okay, Doc?" Marty asked softly, when his friend remained silent.
"No," Doc said. He turned around to look at the condo. "We just lost a great deal of progress from a rather stupid and preventable error."
Marty winced at that as he hugged his arms tightly across his chest in a rather pointless effort to warm up. "Great," he said, rolling his eyes. "So what now?"
Without providing an answer, Doc strode forward, back into the still hazy garage. "Jules," he said to his son, tentatively trying to mop up the water splattered across every inch of the room, "I'd like to see you in the kitchen."
The scientist didn't offer any more of an explanation, continuing his journey into the condo. Jules looked at Marty, frowning a little.
"Is he mad?" he asked.
Marty shrugged, just as curious as the university professor. "I don't know," he said honestly. He went with Jules into the house, where Emily was already in the kitchen, trying to wipe up the water on the chairs and the table with dishtowels as her father brewed a fresh, hot pot of coffee. Once Emily had cleaned things up as best she could, she had a seat. Jules and Marty both stood, but a terse gesture from Doc towards the table convinced them that they should join the woman at the table.
When everyone was sitting, Doc, still standing, leaned across the table, looked at them all, one by one, and said, softly and firmly, "This cannot continue."
"What?" Marty asked, feeling a little lost.
Doc ticked the matters off on his fingers. "None of us have had a proper diet at all in the last few days. We're all running on little or no sleep, caffeine, sugar, and other chemical stimulants. And now, because we've been neglecting those needs, we've lost almost everything we've spent the last several days constructing from a mistake that should have been caught and prevented. All of that deprivation and haste was for nothing."
"So what do you want us to do?" Jules asked. "Work two hours and then stop for the day?"
Doc's eyes focused on him. "I don't want you to do anything," he said. When Jules opened his mouth, clearly hurt by this new restriction, the inventor rushed ahead to explain. "After our discussion tonight, I realized that now things have the potential to really change for you. There is a very strong possibility that, knowing now what you told me, when I speak with your younger self when I return home, he will not be a physics professor at the university. And if that's the case, he will not know everything you know. And that could create some major paradoxes if you helped excessively with building this machine, because--"
"I understand," Jules said softly. "I don't like it at all, but I understand."
"I don't," Marty said, frowning.
"Nor I," Emily said. "What do you think would happen, Daddy?"
Doc sighed, looking over at Jules. The younger man picked up the explanation. "Dad knows now what I really wanted to do with my life -- be a medical doctor, not a scientist. When he gets back home, then, he's going to try and talk to me about that, tell me I don't have to follow in his footsteps if I don't want to. Which is something he never did before. So if that happens and I do end up doing what I want to instead of what I feel that I have to, I wouldn't be as knowledgeable about circuits and time machines and physics as I am now. And if I'm putting together complicated things for the machine, then if my future changes, I wouldn't have been able to do what I did in the first place. And you'll have a paradox."
Marty saw a slight flaw in that theory. "Uh, Doc, if that's true, why didn't things fall apart when you took Jen and I to the future to help our kids? Or are they still gonna be criminals?" The idea depressed him.
"Not necessarily," Doc said. "That was a little different, too. I might very well have brought you to visit the future, regardless, so things still might have been set up the same way. And that incident didn't inherently impact the technology we had in the time machine. In this case, we would be dealing with solid objects that could be changed by the time ripples -- like we've seen newspapers and photographs do."
"What are you going to do with what Jules already did?" Emily asked, still looking a little confused by the topics being bantered. "Throw it out?"
Doc snorted softly. "I doubt there's much we can salvage that he had a real hand in," he said. "Emily, you and Jules should go home and get some sleep. Marty and I can clean things up here, get some rest of our own, and then start things over again."
"Do you still want my help?" Emily asked. At her father's nod, Jules frowned again.
"Is there anything I can possibly do that won't distort the space-time continuum?" he asked.
"I'm sure," Doc said sincerely. "Let me think it over a bit and I'll let you know when you return later."
* * *
Once Emily and Jules had finally left -- around four-thirty after each insisting they help a little with cleaning up inside the condo -- the two time travelers went out to the garage and attempted to clean up and sort through the soggy mess to see what had been damaged beyond repair and what could be salvaged. By the time they finished and mopped the floor, the stack of trash was larger than the stack of things that could still work. While Marty was ready to wallow in depression over this, Doc didn't seem too concerned over it and suggested they shift their energies into cleaning up the condo before getting any rest (which Marty couldn't really argue about, since wet carpet could get rather rank if not dried out).
Jules and Emily had each taken care of cleaning up the two bedrooms with some "hydrovacuumes" and had found some space heaters to rid the air of a nasty damp feel. Even with future technology, however, some things just took time. It was almost early afternoon before the mattresses were dried out enough that they could be given fresh sheets. After moving the heaters to the living room area of the condo, Doc announced at long last they could turn in. After having a quick, hot shower, and changing into clothes that had been kept dry in the dresser, Marty gratefully did just that, the couple hours of rest he'd had earlier long since used up.
When he woke up, seven hours later, it was because his left hand was throbbing with a dull ache. Perhaps the painkillers had finally worn off; perhaps it had become irritated due to all the work he and Doc had done in cleaning up. At any rate, it made it impossible to go back to sleep, so he left his room and, about to go into the bathroom to take something for the pain, saw that Doc was up and with Jules in the living room. Jules noticed him poke his head out of the hallway for a look and nodded.
"Good evening, Marty," he said. "How is your hand doing?"
"Actually, it hurts, still," Marty admitted, finding the question rather timely. "Is that normal?"
"It could be, but if it's still bothering you by tomorrow, you should visit a doctor." Jules smiled crookedly. "I'm not that kind... yet."
The comment reminded Marty of the conversation hours ago. "Did Doc figure out something you could do?" he asked.
Doc answered for Jules. "Yes," he said, glancing over at the young man. "Jules can still fulfill the roll of an assistant so long as he doesn't build or construct anything that could be too complex for a differently educated version of him to know."
"Doesn't sound too restricting," Marty said. He hesitated before asking the next question, not sure he wanted to know. "Are we as bad off as it looked this morning?"
Although Marty had pressed him for answers as they had cleaned up earlier, the inventor had refused to give him an idea of how much damage the various parts of the time machine had sustained and how much would have to be completely rebuilt. Doc had wanted to get some rest before taking on the tedious and disheartening task and Marty had conceded the point.
"Everything that was in the Aerovette is all right," Doc said. "That was smart, pulling the tarp over the back of the car. Some of the things that we had stacked under the tables are salvageable, but everything that had been out on the tables is ruined. That includes the time circuit bank, the numerous circuit boards and loose parts, a few electric tools--"
"And my computer was fried," Emily added, having slipped unnoticed into the room from the garage. "I made a couple backups of the programs before the laptop was 'cuted, so I'm not as far behind as I could be. Still...." She frowned, clearly annoyed. "Now I have to use my backup laptop, and that thing can be a real slug."
"I want to make sure everyone understands a few things before we return to the project," Doc said, glancing around at the faces gathered. "We'll take rotating shifts in working on the machine. No one can work more than, and preferably less than, twelve hours at a stretch. If you work that long, even if you feel you can go longer -- don't. Just have a good meal, watch some television, take a nap. There have been a few too many mistakes made from pushing too hard to get this done and we don't need any more setbacks."
"All right."
"I understand."
"No problem."
"During the time when you are working, when you're hungry, take a break and come in here and eat something that doesn't use the word 'instant' in the title. It'll keep your energy up much better in the long run. And, frankly, I think it tastes better, too. I ordered some more balanced food, as well as some replacement parts and tools for the ones lost, and they should be here shortly."
Emily, Marty, and Jules all nodded.
"All right," Doc said, standing up from the chair he'd been in. "Jules, you help Emily out with her testing. Marty, you'll be assisting me."
Minutes later the pairs were back to being hard at work in the garage. The faint, lingering smell of the fire was a constant reminder that, in this case, speed wasn't necessarily a good thing. And they slowed down.
* * *
Doc's rules and restrictions were more or less followed as the days passed. Just about everyone, at one point, tried to continue working more than they could, or should, or else was caught trying to get away with a "dinner" of soda and a cup of instant noodles. But the scientist had expected such slip ups -- and, frankly, had tried to sneak one by once or twice himself -- so the perpetrators would get a lengthy reminder about the fire and other possible calamities that could occur. Doc didn't ban anyone from helping out; frankly, they couldn't spare the loss of those hands.
The time machine began to look less like a car and more like the temporal device it was to be. As promised, Doc did install the thumbprint locks on the car, including one for the ignition, meaning anyone who wanted to drive the Aerovette would need to be cleared through an elaborate security system that Emily was making especially for the machine. The time circuit display, once charmingly digital, was replaced by a flat 12.1 inch touch-sensitive plasma screen set into the dash that could display information with shocking clarity. Now, Doc could finally see the location displays for the last time departed, present time, and destination time, rather than just the last one. The screen could also double as a display for the Temporal Influence Projection System, which provided that much additional room in the car. No keyboard was necessary for inputting destinations or other information; the entire car was able to understand commands verbally, a standard feature in vehicles by this point and one that Emily had persuaded Doc to incorporate into the time circuits and the machine's computer as well.
The scientist happily loaded a number of DVD-roms into the new computer system of the time machine, with millions of different maps from thousands of different time periods and locations that he had sent Jules off to collect from the library. It was an addition that he'd been wanting to put into the DeLorean and train, but was previously limited by computers that weren't quite fast or large enough for the job that could also be contained in already cramped conditions.
Other than those obvious upgrades, this time machine was quite similar to the DeLorean, save for one noted differences -- size. In almost forty years, electronics and microchips had shrunk drastically, and the end result was that the cab of the Aerovette didn't feel nearly as cramped as the DeLorean, although it was actually a bit smaller. The DeLorean had at least a bit of space behind the seats; the Aerovette had no such feature. It was truly a two-seater car.
Two weeks after the fire, Emily and Jules proposed a temporary halt to the time machine work, on account of the Thanksgiving holiday, and invited Marty and Doc to Jules' home for a relaxing, old fashioned holiday meal. Though Doc felt they were just days away from finishing now (most of their time was being spent on the installation of devices into and onto the car) and he was made rather uncomfortable by the idea of visiting the house that he and Clara had owned, he agreed that a day off might do them all good. And he could tell that the dinner was especially important to Jules and Emily -- it would be the first time they had spent the holiday with their father in forty years.
After sleeping late and cleaning up the condo a little, which had grown rather messy in the weeks since their arrival, Doc and Marty took a cab to the familiar address around two in the afternoon. When the vehicle pulled up at the curbside, and the time travelers got out, Doc felt a very odd sense of deja vu as he looked over the home. Someone had painted it a different color, and the trees and foliage had grown considerably larger. There was no familiar sight of the old barn that should've been visible off to the side and in back of the home; instead, in its place, there was what looked to be a smaller, fairly new two story garage. The buildings all seemed to be in good repair, however, and Doc was pleasantly surprised by that. The brick walkway leading up to the house was shoveled of the half foot of snow that had fallen recently, and it looked as if it had been recently relaid. (Which, frankly, wouldn't have surprised him, considering the age it must have been now.) Bushes and trees had been trimmed so they hadn't overrun the yard. Tasteful curtains hung in the windows. If the scientist hadn't known better, he would have assumed that a couple lived here, not a bachelor. The question of the home's appearance was answered by Jules, as the man took their coats in the entryway, when Doc had cautiously broached the subject.
"Once a month I hire a cleaning woman and she makes sure the place isn't too shabby. In the warmer months, I have people work on maintaining the yard to keep it nice -- Mom's garden is still in good shape, if you want to see it."
Doc shook his head at the question. Marty, not bothering to be subtle as he looked around the foyer, nodded to himself. "Looks like someone came recently," he said. "I don't see the cobwebs, anymore."
"Yesterday," Jules confirmed as he hung their coats on a rack next to the door. "Do you want a tour?" he added, noticing Doc taking quick, cautious glances around.
The inventor shook his head quickly. "No, thanks," he said. "Better that I see as little of this home as possible. Too many memories...."
Jules nodded, understanding. "Emily thought it might be better to have it at her place, but it's smaller and the kitchen is a little primitive. If you're too bothered, we won't be offended if you want to leave."
Doc hoped it wouldn't come to that. Jules led them to the living room at the front of the house, adjacent to the entrance. Through the propped-open French doors that separated the two rooms, Emily could be seen setting the dining room table. She smiled at the guests. "Welcome," she said, pausing in her chore. "The turkey should be done around four. Did you want anything to drink? Jules bought just about anything you might want."
"Except alcohol," the man said, glancing at Marty. "Dad and I can't drink it, Emily doesn't like to, so frankly it just didn't occur to me.... We did get some non-alcoholic wine for the meal..."
Marty waved away the apology as he sat down on a couch that Doc did not recognize. "No problem. I'd rather just have a diet Pepsi, anyway."
Emily nodded. "We have that," she said. "Daddy? Do you want anything?"
"I'm fine, Emily. Thanks."
Emily went off into the kitchen to get Marty's drink as the scientist finally took a seat in the room. He found himself trying to stare about the room, see the differences that had happened since he had last been where he was, and quickly tried to distract himself from doing that. Jules noticed the discomfort and immediately tried to engage him in a conversation.
"Is the time machine as close to being done as you thought last night?"
Doc nodded at the question. "So far, the new computer and the programs Emily made look to be operating well, and the subsystems and devices already installed are showing up in the diagnostics and operations display. I think we'll be gone by this time next week."
"Thank God," Marty said with a sigh, leaning back into the couch. "As nice as some of the stuff in the future is -- and I'm talking about inventions and technology, not about what's happened to our families -- I'd much rather live without it all, just to see faces I recognize and that aren't almost forty years older. Hell, at this point I think if I knew what would've happened on this trip and had to choose between that and having to postpone the wed