As long as Marty had known Doc, he'd never seen him as angry as he was now to be facing the newcomer. "Dale Catledge," the old man muttered contemptuously, "I should have suspected you'd be involved in this somehow."

"Well, well, Dr. Emmett Gray," Catledge was surprised to see him again, "How's things since we last met?"

"My name is Brown, thank you very much, and thanks to you, it's not as rosy as it should have been!" Doc shouted, "And I'm telling you right now, I'm appalled at what I've seen here today! I demand you cease and desist all tests and such you have planned for David in the near future, or I'll go to the press, so help me God!"

"Oh, I see, you think you know what's best for him, old timer." Catledge chuckled with a mixture of contempt and hilarity.

"Much more so than you obviously do, Catledge!" Doc ranted onward, "The boy is not one of your laboratory animals to experiment on endlessly! He needs to be returned to his time immediately, or the consequences for the space-time continuum could be disastrous!"

"All right, if it makes you feel any better, Dr. Brown, we're only holding him over for forty-eight hours," Faraday spoke up quickly, "I made a note to his family on that. And once we're done..."

"Then what? Extend him even longer like you did with the astronauts from the failed Alpha Centuri project, some of whom were never seen by their families again!?" Doc posed, "I know you, Faraday. You've taken after your second father here all to beautifully, as I've come to see in the papers. He never put much stock in telling people the truth, and since Challenger went up in smoke, neither have you! You're both glory hounds out to line your pockets and...!"

"I think we've heard enough," Catledge interrupted, "Colonel Scroeder, would you kindly remove these gentleman from the premises?"

"You're not getting rid of me so easy, Catledge!" Doc bellowed, twisting out of Scroeder's grasp and storming up to within inches of his old enemy, "I know what you want here! You want the time-travel ability to make yourself all-powerful! Well I'm not going to let the world fall into your hands!"

"Hey, nobody touches Dr. Catledge!" Biff shoved Doc backwards, "Not even...!" He looked surprised when he saw whom he was protecting his master from. "Dr. Brown?" he asked in shock, "McFly?"

"BIFF!?" the two of them asked in unison. "What are you doing here?" all three of them asked.

"You two are leaving, that's for sure," Scroeder waved to his men, who dragged the teen and scientist out the door. "You know them, Tannen?" Catledge had to ask his valet.

"Yeah, Dr. Catledge, they're the two goofballs from back home in Hill Valley," Biff said, "I have a sort of up and down relationship with the kid's dad. I wouldn't worry about them, they're harmless."

"You'd better be right on that, Tannen," Catledge warned him.

Outside, Marty and Doc were physically tossed out the front gate. "And if I catch either of you in here again, it'll be curtains for you!" Scroeder shouted as he closed the gate behind them.

"Yeah, well what goes around comes around, tough guy!" Marty yelled back at him. He rushed over to his friend. "You OK there, Doc?"

"Never felt better, Marty," Doc said, brushing himself off, "Let's go back to Fort Lauderdale. I have some serious thinking to do."

July 17, 1986

3:37 p.m.

"Show me the data you collected during the last test," Catledge said to Faraday as they plopped down in front of several monitors in the main lab.

"All right, when we first received word that David had these memories stored away in his brain, we of course appropriated him for further research," Faraday said, punching several figures into the computer, "During the examination, we had a strange experience wherein he'd say one thing and different images would pop up here on the screen. Somehow over the past eight years he's been to a planet called Phaelon in a system we've never even known the existence of before, if you'll observe. It's not supposed to be too far away, actually, only a few hundred light years."

He pointed to various new star systems popping up on the screen. Catledge was blown away. "What about the entity?" he inquired, "Have you been able to look it up closer?"

"Uh, no, that's the one problem with our research here," Faraday admitted, "We've done everything, but we can't seem to gain access to it."

"Have you tried dynamite?" Gately suggested from behind the two of them.

"Seriously Dr. Gately, do you think..." Faraday started to say.

"Dr. Gately has a point there, Dr. Faraday," Catledge said, "You need to get tougher if you expect to get what you want in life. And while I'm asking, do you want to explain how this got out?" He held up the day's newspaper heralding David's find.

"Uh, honestly I don't know," Faraday told him, "Someone with the police must have spilled it, because I've had this place under the tightest security ever since we brought the entity in."

"Well you need to make it even tighter," Catledge said, "I want this place to be a fortress for at least the next week. This is a secret only the highest persons should know. Call the Freemans and tell them we need their son indefinitely. I want to know more about how he went through time."

"Why do we even have to tell them anything, Dr. Catledge?" Marner suggested, "Like you just said, it's a need-know situation, and I only told the press about the runaway robot at Nova since..."

"Good point," Catledge interrupted him, "We won't tell them anything. In the meantime, Dr. Faraday, I want a full slate of tests run for the kid over the next two days, including a full radiation test and CAT Scan. And I want that thing cracked open somehow and its time traveling system analyzed, or I can find a new director here. There are plenty of other people who can probably do the job just as well as you can."

"I understand, Dr. Catledge," Faraday said, gulping slightly.

"In the meantime," Catledge continued, "I want a full alert put up for our friend Dr. Brown. I don't trust him in the least, and he'll probably be back in the near future to spring the kid again. Gately, tell Colonel Scroeder that if Brown shows up again, I want him shot on sight."

"That's an affirmative, Dr. Catledge," Gately said, making notes on a notepad.

"And now, I'm going upstairs to my penthouse, and I don't want to be disturbed for any reason until at least ten tomorrow morning," Catledge told his colleagues, "Tannen, the door please."

"Right away, Dr. Catledge sir," Biff held the door open for Catledge as he and Haeckel left the lab. "So, what do we do after we find out what's been happening?" he asked, "Send a rocket to this Phaelon place?"

"Maybe," Catledge said as he entered the elevators and pressed the button for the top floor, "First off, Tannen, my primary interest here is with the time traveling system on the spacecraft. As long as that works out for me, then we'll see about the planet Phaelon."

"So where will we go if we find out how to master time?" Biff asked, "'Cause I always wanted to see what the big Indian battles looked like in the Great Plains..."

"Maybe, Tannen, maybe," Catledge said, "I have several ideas where I might want to go."

The elevator stopped at the penthouse Catledge had persuaded NASA to let him have. I was just as luxurious as his Hill County dwellings, with huge tapestries on the windows, a four-corner bed with curtains, and full dining room. "Ready my towels, Tannen," Catledge ordered Biff, "I need to take a shower."

July 17, 1986

4:49 p.m.

"Are you sure you're all right Doc?" Marty asked him as they drove back down I-95. His friend had not said much during the trip back, staring straight ahead down the road with a determined look on his face. "Earth to Doc, are you in there?" he repeated.

"I'm here, Marty," Doc said softly, "I'm just trying to think of a way to beat Catledge at his own game."

"You never said anything about knowing THE Dale Catledge," Marty said.

"THE Dale Catledge doesn't exist, Marty," Doc spoke up sharply, "The man you think is Dale Catledge is a cunning charlatan who hides behind the veil of science to make himself the richest man on earth."

"Well, do you want to tell me how he got that way?" Marty was quite interested. From all the newspaper accounts he'd read, Catledge was a nice guy.

"Oh he was always that way, back to when we worked together on the Manhattan Project during the War," Doc explained, "Our very approaches to that assignment delineated us; I was thrilled about the prospect of bettering scientific knowledge of the atomic world, whereas he cared mostly for the destructive power of the atom. Indeed, the only thing that kept us harmonious during that time was our shared affection to succeed in inventing time travel, although even then I had a feeling his aims in that area were rather sinister. After the bombs were dropped we split up and I didn't hear from him again until 1957, when NASA asked me to help develop their rocketing systems, and I ended up with him again. It was then that I realized the full aim of his thrust to make himself powerful. He all but blackmailed the general in charge to accept his design for the Mercury program. The shoddy system he created killed eight good people when it misfired during its first full-scale test. Rather than accept the blame like a real man, he falsified documents and made it look like I was the guilty party. To make things worse, he spread false rumors to the papers that I was a psychopath who'd deliberately sabotaged the rockets. It didn't help me that he had several friends in high places. To make a long story short, I was discredited and fired from the program with the reputation of being a madman, which, as you know, still haunts me to this day. I was very fortunate to be allowed to teach at Cal State-Bakersfield in the first place. And every time he receives one of those unearned awards, I cringe at the unfairness of it all."

"So everything he says he's invented over the years really wasn't made by him?" Marty was intrigued.

"Marty, the man couldn't assemble a Lincoln log cabin, let alone a missile defense system!" Doc said sternly, "He has enough losers around him willing enough to let him take credit for their inventions. He's also not about more ruthless tactics, either; I know for sure of three people he's killed to become Mr. California, and there's probably even more skeletons in the closet I don't know about. And through it all, time travel's been his aim. If he figures out how to work the time travel system that's just fallen into his lap right now, the world will become abruptly about ten times worse than Hell Valley could ever be!"

Marty whistled in awe of what they were up against. "I see why we need to get David and whatever got him here back to the past," he said, "But how do you suggest we do it? They're going to be on the lookout for us now."

"Fortunately David was able to tell us where the time travel source seems to be stored presently, so our first aim is to get him and it there and get them both as far away from NASA and Catledge as we can," Doc said, "And once that's accomplished, we send him back in time by any means necessary. Perhaps," he glanced at his watch, "my old student Wayne Szelinski may prove useful to us in this endeavor."