Chapter 10 – The Transportation History of New Jersey

June 27th 2011
1998 Counterparts

Doc and Marty arrived back at the time train a couple of hours later after hitching a ride with a questionable looking trucker headed in the general direction of the forest. They'd learned from the trucker that the forest was a part of a kind of nature preserve, and for that they were thankful - perhaps it meant they'd be away from prying eyes while they tried to make repairs to a time machine that might very well never run again.

For his part, Marty was trying to stay calm and positive, and not to think too much about what not being able to get back to 1998 might mean. After all, there wasn't a hell of a lot he could do about it - either they had the parts they needed, or they didn't. Either they could fix it, or they couldn't.

Either Jennifer wouldn't see him again for thirteen years, or - well, he couldn't really think of a good answer for that. He hoped that he'd bought enough packing tape before he left.

His feet ached and his mouth thirsted for water as he crashed through yet another patch of brambles, his period-accurate 1911 shoes doing very little to make the trek easier, and threw a glance behind him, where Doc struggled through in much the same way, a pained look on his face that meant he was concentrating deeply. Marty could almost feel the weight of Doc's thoughts on his own shoulders.

And weighty the thoughts were to Doc's mind. Here he'd gone and gotten Marty into yet more one spot of real trouble, one that might mean he'd lose out on thirteen years of his family's life and his own. He'd already dragged Marty to a new 1985 timeline, meaning Marty had had to get used to the new personalities of his family, and despite Marty's stoic reaction to the situation, Doc knew it couldn't have been without its problems. How could it have been? When a person spends 17 years growing up in one family only to be thrust into what essentially amounted to a new one - the adjustment couldn't have been easy, even if his "new" family was an improvement, personality wise, over the old one.

He couldn't help but think of what the time machine(s) had meant for his own small family. Well he understood the implications for Clara, Jules and Verne, what years spent in all different times and places had done to impact them. He was immensely proud of all of them, and thought of them all as were wonderful people, but he knew what sacrifices had been borne in the wake of his scientific inventions. He knew that was the reason Clara never really felt at home in the 1990's, even if she'd done her best to adjust. He knew that was probably why Jules always had such a hard time making friends, and why Verne was too quick to jump into friendships and relationships that weren't always the healthiest choices for him. While he understood that "normal" was relative and everyone had their own emotional baggage to carry, he sometimes wondered what his own baggage - his drive to fulfill his own dreams and ambitions, and drag the family along for the ride - had meant for Clara, Jules, Verne, and even Marty and Jennifer.

He hoped that when all was said and done, when he was nearing the end of his life, he could still look back on it all with pride of a job well done.

"Finally!" Marty cried ahead of him as the outline of the time train came into view. They both sprinted the last few hundred yards towards the train, and Doc immediately threw the compartment door open and dove inside, beginning to pick through the contents of the storage compartment to get the needed parts for repair. Marty, feeling it was perhaps best to let Doc attend to that sort of thing (as he had no idea what parts one needed to repair a time machine), sat on the steps of the train, wiping his brow in the late afternoon sun. He wasn't sure how much manual labor he could pull off once he got back to the morning of June 27th, 1998, as he was now exhausted from the day's actions and the thought of hefting heavy boxes around made him want to scream.

His breath caught in his throat for a moment and he swallowed hard. Forget how tired I am, he thought to himself. I'd happily load a hundred moving trucks single-handedly if it meant we got home safely.

Doc suddenly reappeared in the engine room bearing a few power tools, and set to work removing the cover of the control panel, muttering curses under his breath. Marty stood and leaned in the doorway.

"Anything you want me to do, Doc?" he asked.

"Not yet, Marty, but stick close by," Doc instructed. The corner of Marty's mouth twitched into a small smile, having heard that same familiar phrase for years whenever he was helping Doc with some mechanical conundrum.

Marty descended the steps to the ground languidly, hands in pockets, and inhaled deeply. All things considered, a forest was a nice change from some of the other places he'd found himself traveling with the Browns: the crowded Roman streets of two millennia ago, vast swamplands of the Jurassic period, battlefields of wars that had long ago been won or lost. He crossed his arms across his chest, enjoying the sun on his face, but jumped back suddenly when he saw the movement of red and yellow in the bushes a hundred yards ahead of him.

"We're lost, I'm tellin' ya!" came a bawling shout as a man dressed in red shorts, yellow polo shirt, white socks pulled up to his knees and white sneakers emerged from the brush. "And I can't get a goddamn signal on the GPS out here, all these damn trees, I - " The man stopped mid-sentence when he caught sight of the train before him. "Holy shhh - Marge! Marge, c'mere! You gotta see this!"

"Oh, dammit," Marty muttered, doing a poor job of hiding behind one of the train's massive wheels.

A moment later, a large woman followed by a kid of about ten years, who was wearing a deep scowl, materialized from out of the shadows thrown by the trees. Marge, with a tightly-curled hairdo that resembled shag carpeting and large sunglasses crowning her face, made a surprised yap but nevertheless immediately held up a small silver box and clicked a button.

"Oh yeah," she said, self-satisfied with a nod. "That's a good one. Mark, get up there by that train. Go on. We'll make it our Christmas card."

"Do I hafta?" whined the young boy, his arms flopping at his sides in his best display of apathy.

"Do as your mother says," the man, who Marty could only assume to be the father, demanded as he continued to gaze in awe at the train. He seemed to suddenly shake free of his reverie and caught sight of Marty hunched down by the wheels. The man immediately strode forward, hand extended. "Well hiya!" he called, grinning. "Sam Chapel, nice to meet you!"

Not having any choice, Marty set his jaw and shook the man's hand as firmly as he could. "Nice to meet you," he managed.

"Got a name?"

"Uh...Thomas," Marty stammered. "Thomas Edison...ford. Thomas Edisonford."

"Edisonford?" Sam guffawed. "Well what are you then, an Edison or a Ford? Either way, names like that around here are made of money, aren't they?"

"Ah, I wouldn't - I wouldn't know," Marty spluttered. Even after all of the years he'd traveled with Doc, he'd gotten no better at aliases and backstories. "I'm just an Edisonford. From...California."

"This ain't a real train, you know," Mark yammered as he hung off the front of the train. "Real trains need tracks."

"What is this thing, anyway?" Marge inquired, popping her gum. "What's it doin' way out here?"

"It's a public history display," Doc's voice sounded behind them, as he stepped down off the train. "Park service is trying something new, you know. Putting exhibits outside of a museum."

"Yeah, that's right," Marty chimed in quickly, picking up the direction of Doc's explanation immediately. "We're historical reinactors. Period accurate to 1911." He gave them a slight nod as though this should impress them, and he was rewarded when the family certainly looked as though they were. "We do shows every day at ten, one, three and four. We do interactive presentations about the transportation history of New Jersey."

Doc stood with his hands clasped in front of him and nodded. "We're funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This week we're here, next week we'll be in...uh, another…fine town in New Jersey."

"How do you move it, though?" Marge demanded. She adjusted the sunglasses on her nose. "It looks...it almost looks like a real train!"

"It is fully operational," Doc said as Marty resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Like most people, Doc relished the opportunity to humbly brag about his toys - as much as he could to strangers who mustn't know about time travel, anyway. "It can run along standard train tracks just like any other train. For our purposes though, we rely on large semis, of course."

"Must be a huge semi," Sam said in a voice that betrayed his disbelief.

"It is," Marty interjected quickly. "It's a - a - twenty-six wheeler."

"Twenty-six? But there's no - "

"Custom built, of course." Marty did his best at a smile.

Marge suddenly slapped Sam's shoulder. "See, what'd I tell you? Nothin' wrong with spending an afternoon in a park, you could learn something - "

"Yeah, yeah," Sam said curtly. "A train in the forest. Real educational. Never heard of such a thing. Mark, get off of that wheel. C'mon, we gotta go."

Marty and Doc watched the family go, and Marty breathed a sigh of relief. "That was close. Good thinking Doc."

"Well, it isn't the first time that's worked," Doc admitted. "People will believe anybody who looks like they know what they're talking about. The Milgram Experiment of early 1960's proved it. But unfortunately, we've got a bigger problem than hikers."

Marty turned to him, a concerned look playing across his features. "Don't tell me. We don't have the right parts?"

Doc pulled a rag out of his back pocket and ran it along his face tiredly. "Most of the circuit board needs to be replaced but I don't have a spare one on board. I have a feeling that the older of my offspring probably absconded with it to build God-knows-what."

Marty's face fell. "Then what are we going to do?" He watched Doc begin to pace nervously, and the lump immediately returned to Marty's throat. "Doc, we have a plan or something, right? Some sort of contingency tactic? Or at the very least, a creative idea?"

"Marty, I told you that nothing is impossible, and I meant it," Doc told him flatly. He stared hard into the distance. "Something will turn up. I can feel it."