Disclaimer: Once upon a time, there was a movie trilogy called Back to the Future, and there was a boy, and he didn't own the trilogy.
Author's Note: New chapter. Interesting things are revealed and research is done. And there's some hope that this mess might be fixed. Somehow. One day. Oh, and Bttf4444, I don't recall if I already mentioned this to you, but didn't you mean 'Clint Eastwood' in your reply?
9: Chapter Nine
Over the next hour, Lorraine and Marty sat down and talked. They compared histories for as good as they could, with Marty telling his mother all about what the original 1985 was like and about his trip to 2015 which had apparently created this world, and Lorraine told her son all she knew about how Biff had gotten rich. It just confirmed the suspicion that had already been rising in Marty's head – that Biff was behind it. "He has altered history somehow" the teen replied. "I'm not sure how he did it, but he must have. The hints all point towards him. He's the one who's rich and famous. My father, his one great opponent, is dead. There are changes on a world wide scale, but nothing we can't track down and follow back to that one big win Biff made and all those winnings he made afterwards. He must have travelled through time and made himself rich."
Lorraine frowned. "How could that happen?" she asked. "Didn't you have the machine on you all the time?"
"Well, it's hard to stuff a temporal field warping and displacement machine into one's pocket" Marty said, smiling. "And we did talk to Biff briefly, while we were in 2015. Something we said then must have made him suspicious and made him steal the vehicle. It also explains why Jennifer was unconscious. She hadn't fallen asleep, she had been knocked out so Biff could travel through time." He sighed. "Anyway, it doesn't matter too much how it happened. What matters is how we can prevent it."
They kept talking about that issue for the next few minutes, and Marty managed to get a lot of information about any activities that pointed to Biff messing with time out of Lorraine. "He told me a lot about it" she explained. "I suppose he just liked to brag."
Eventually, Marty and Lorraine arrived at a point where they could not solve anything by simple conversation anymore. Marty was insistent on having a look at the library, especially because when questioned about Biff's first win, Lorraine mentioned having seen something weird in the paper that dealt with it. However, the library was closed in this world, which meant, according to Marty, that they'd have to force their way in. While Lorraine wasn't at ease with the idea of breaking into a library, she agreed that if it was for the sake of returning the universe to how it should be, it would have to be done.
Careful to avoid Biff or any of his gang, Marty and Lorraine then headed down the stairs and out through the doors of the Pleasure Paradise. The teenager frowned as he sniffed the air. "This is not clean" he muttered.
"You hadn't noticed that before?" Lorraine asked, as they descended the stairs.
"I think there's enough here to make one worried about other things and not notice things like odd smells" Marty replied. "There's all these bikers and toxic waste plants and… Great Scott, Emmett!"
The teen ran over to his friend, who smiled in relief when he saw him. "Marty!" he called out, surprised. "I figured you were here, but not that you would come out of the building and run towards me!"
Marty smiled. "I suppose so" he replied. "I met up with my mother and talked to her a bit. We just decided to head over to the library to track down information about how this world came to be."
"Hi, Emmett" Lorraine said, giving a shy wave. "Marty told me that he had returned from the future to find everything different from how he remembered it. Since this is not a world which I particularly like living in, I volunteered to help him change it."
"Thank you, I suppose" Emmett replied. "So, it's off to the library?"
"Right" Marty said. "My car is parked outside the Square, if it wasn't stolen during the past three hours – with all these, uh, people around, who knows what might have happened. During the ride over, you can tell us about how you found me. And what occurred to Jennifer? Is she still asleep?"
"She should be" Emmett replied. "She was asleep when I left the house." He smiled at the teen. "Marty, I'm glad to see you safe. When I heard about where you had gone, I thought that you might not have come out alive, considering what this place appears to be like."
"How did you hear where I went?" Marty wanted to know.
"Well," Emmett responded, "you see…"
Over their drive to the library in the truck, which had, to Marty's relief, not been stolen, Emmett told Marty and Lorraine all about his adventures. After Marty had left, the sixty-five-year-old had looked around some more and realized that something was seriously wrong. He had collected old papers lying around, the youngest of which reporting to him that the day was January 23rd, 1975. Though this had surprised him, what had surprised him much more was the headline of the paper. It said 'Emmett Brown Imprisoned – Local Ranch Owner Found Guilty of McFly Murder Case'.
"What?" Marty called out, stunned.
"It's true" Lorraine said. "I remember it. You were involved in a large-scale trial all throughout the winter of 1974/75. You were finally found guilty on evidence I could not believe, and thrown into jail for twenty-five years. I've visited your other self a few years ago… he didn't seem to be all that well to me. I wonder whether you're going to last those remaining fifteen years."
"Fourteen years, two months and twenty-eight days" Marty corrected. "Great Scott… what happened to Jennifer?"
"She left town a few months later" Lorraine replied. "Don't feel hurt, Emmett – it's not like she didn't want to be with you. She just couldn't stay anymore. If I had been wise, I'd followed her, but by that point, my financial situation had gone too far and I was convincing myself that a marriage to Biff Tannen would be the wiser option." She sighed. "Go on, Emmett."
The horse dealer continued his tale, telling of how he had, after finding the newspaper, gone off to search for Marty. He had felt horribly confused about what had happened, but he'd come to the same conclusion as Marty – that things had changed. He didn't know how, but they had. He had thus gone to Marty's house, found the man Marty had encountered earlier on there, and with aid of people who had seen the teen passing over the past few hours, he had managed to find his way to the square. He'd just arrived, had seen the casino and was pondering what to do when Marty had appeared as well.
Marty then told his friend about what he had found out, and Lorraine chimed in with further information. About his father's murder – something Emmett had already known of course, having read it in the paper which framed him for it, but hearing it from Lorraine and Marty was something else entirely – and about Biff's immense, unexplainable wealth. They had just finished their side of the story when the truck arrived at the library.
As Lorraine had told them, the place was a shadow of what it had once been. It was boarded up and a sign of 'Closed Permanently' hung on the door. Marty, however, took a step back, and as Emmett and Lorraine still wondered what he was doing, he ran towards the door, preparing to hit it as hard as he could and smash through it.
When he did so, he found out that either the place had been shut for a real long time, or the entrance hadn't been that well when it was still working. The door was easily broken, and Marty had to stop himself from falling against a wall behind it. He smiled, blushing a little. "Well, we can go in now" he said, pointing inside.
The library looked even messier from the inside than from the outside. The place was cluttered with papers everywhere, and Marty came to a halt as he walked in, shocked. Emmett echoed his sentiments. "How are we going to find anything in this!" he complained, shaking his head.
"Well, we know the exact date" Marty said, trying to regain his old optimism. "We're looking for the paper of March 27th, 1958. That one details Biff's first win, and it should allow us to get Lorraine's suspicion confirmed or denied."
"What if I was wrong?" his mother asked. "What if there really isn't anything in the paper to help us out?"
"We'll see what we're going to do then when it comes to that" Marty said, smiling. "Let's go now, we've got lots of work to do."
After a minute or two, it turned out that he was right. The papers were cluttered in an absolutely random fashion, as if a tornado had raged right through it. Papers about a certain stock market crash on Wall Street in 1929 were harmoniously located next to Nixon's third term re-election in 1977, the latter of which was something that surprised Marty a lot and once more made clear how much Biff had changed the world. But anyway, the papers weren't exactly in a certain order, and as a result, research had to be done in a way that would take time.
In the end, it was only a quarter before Emmett was the one to find the paper they were looking for. The headline was 'Hill Valley Man Wins Big At Races' and underneath, a smiling picture of Biff was shown. Emmett handed it over to Lorraine, who nodded, recognizing it. "Yeah, this is it" she muttered. "I don't see anything particularly remarkable, though. I don't know…"
Suddenly, she found herself holding a magnifying glass. Marty smiled. "I found it on one of the shelves" he said. "I had figured that it might come to great use in attempting to track down what exactly happened."
Lorraine nodded. "It might indeed." She put the glass closer, and examined the paper as well as she could, holding it in the light so she could see it even better. "Hmm, I still can't find… wait a minute! Marty, can you see what that is?"
Her teenaged son looked over at the spot Lorraine pointed to – something sticking out of Biff's bag. "Not immediately, no" he replied. "Let me have a look." He took the magnifying glass from her. "Oh, yes, I can see it now. It is a book. It says American sports statistics, 1945 to 1995…" As he realized what it meant, his head shot up. "Great Scott!"
"This is heavy!"
Lorraine turned to Marty, frowning at his and Emmett's reaction. "Excuse me, but what is so strange about this? Well, besides the years?"
"We've seen the book before" Marty explained. "In a store in 2015. Emmett wanted to buy it, but I convinced him not to." He sighed. "Now I'm almost wishing I had allowed him to purchase the item. At least then it would not have ended up in Biff's hands."
"At least we're now sure that he stole the time machine" Emmett said. "And that he gave the book to himself in the past. So, we go back to the future, we stop him from stealing the machine…"
Marty stared at him. "Emmett, are you insane? We can not go to the times that have not occurred yet from the world's current perspective! Not now that the timeline as it is now has firmly established itself! We couldn't stop Biff from stealing it as he wouldn't be there!"
Emmett frowned. "What do you mean?"
"If we take the time machine and go back to the time we came from, to 2015, it will be the 2015 of this reality" Marty explained. "It will be the future of this horrible world, and Biff would not have a reason to steal the machine as he would already be rich."
Emmett frowned more. "But isn't that a paradox?" he said.
"Exactly" Marty said. "That's why one thing we should avoid above all is going back to 2015. We can not go there as we might end up being caught in the end of the space-time continuum. And I'm determined not to see that occur, not when there's a way to stop it."
"But didn't you just come from 2015?" Lorraine asked. "If you came from the 2015 as you say it should be, shouldn't you also be able to go back?" Emmett nodded in agreement.
"I'm not sure why, but it is quite certain for me that that is not the case" Marty said. "We departed 2015 after Biff had taken the time machine back into time. So we should have been in the alternate 2015, and thus in the paradox. But though we saw things beginning to alter around us, as I now realize they were, we remembered them being different before, something we shouldn't, since we were not involved in Biff's change. I speculate that the reason was that we were in the times that have yet to come instead of our home time, and that this gives us some form of immunity to changes wrought by time travelling."
"Now this makes my head hurt" Emmett complained.
"I suppose so" Marty replied. "It is a little confusing, I admit, especially at such a late hour. I am not sure I understand it myself."
Emmett then had a thought. "Marty, you said that we had taken the time machine back after Biff had gone off with it, right?"
"That's correct" Marty replied. "Why?"
In response, Emmett started to beam. "In that case, I know where he went" he said. As he got surprised and even doubting looks from his friends, he explained: "Remember that strange departure time we saw? How we thought that it was some kind of error? Well, it wasn't. It was the date Biff had just come from."
For a moment, Marty felt happy that Emmett had solved the mystery, and even proud of his best friend. Then, he suddenly got a shock, as he remembered what the date had been. "Emmett, do you know what this means?"
"Uh… that we can go there?"
"It means that Biff travelled to November 12th, 1955!"
Emmett gasped. "That was the day you travelled back to 1985!"
"Exactly" Marty agreed. "That means that if we were to go there to retrieve the sports book, there will be two versions of each of us. That is a situation I'm not particularly looking forwards to… even if it does give you the trip to 1955 you wanted to go on, Emmett."
"Yeah – but it's more like one positive thing with a hundred bad things" Emmett replied, sighing.
Marty nodded, and started to pace around. "We're going to have to handle the situation with care, if we want to avoid altering history – our own history – even more" he muttered. "As a result, this information we have will not suffice."
"What do you suggest?" Lorraine asked.
"I suggest that we go to the source" Marty said. "Ask Biff himself. Ask him to tell us exactly how, where and at what time of day he got the book."
"Marty, are you insane?" Emmett asked. "That's just stupid! There's no way Biff is ever going to tell you that! It would destroy everything he's done in the past thirty years! He'd be insane to do that! Uh, not that Biff isn't a little crazy, but…"
"I understand" Marty said. "I was thinking about that myself as I came up with the idea. We do have a big advantage in that he doesn't know what we need the information for, but besides that…"
"I'll ask him" Lorraine said.
"What?" Marty exclaimed. "Mother, I can not request this from you!"
"I'll help you two" Lorraine said. "If you're going to fix the world and bring George back, I should give you every bit of help you need. I've been married to Biff for ten years now, so I should be able to get it out of him with little to no trouble."
Marty frowned. "Mother, if you're doing this to gain a position in the time vehicle when we go back to 1955, then I must disappoint you. We can not take you along, considering the fact that you are native to this world. You must change along with the world around you to get the you back that should have been."
If Lorraine was disappointed, she didn't show it. "I suppose I understand" she nodded. "But that's not why I'm doing it. I want to help, Marty. This is as important to me as it is to you." She allowed herself to have a slight smile, as she saw Marty being convinced by her arguments. She stuck out her hand. "Do we have an agreement?"
Marty looked at her. She might be his mother and he did not want Biff to hurt her, but as usual, his scientific side took precedence. Free help had been offered, help that would, as Lorraine had pointed out, be useful and much more capable of wriggling information out of Biff Tannen than any of them, and he'd be stupid to turn it down. He nodded, slowly, accepting the hand she was offering. "We have an agreement."
