A/N: I'd been using hashes for scene changed but I don't think they've been coming out on the forum, so I'm using horizonal rules in this chapter. Better?

Chapter 8

6:05 PM
Nov 5 1995
Hill Valley California

"That's the cables all connected. How do you turn it on?"

"Should be a button... there. Okay Doc, this is it."

The video footage Marty had recorded started to play.

"Never mind that now, never mind that now."

"All right, I'm ready."

"You're never ready."

"Why that's me! Look at me, I'm an old man!" the inventor of 1955 exclaimed.

"Good evening, I'm Dr Emmett Brown. I'm standing on the parking lot of Lone Pines Mall. It's Saturday morning, October 26th 1985, 1:18am and this is temporal experiment number one. C'mon, Einie."

Thank God I've still got my hair. What on Earth is that thing I'm wearing?

"Well, that's a radiation suit" Catherine explained.

"Radiation suit, of course, 'cause of all of the fall out from the atomic wars. This is truly amazing, a portable television studio" Emmet remarked as he fast-forwarded the video.

"Wars? No, it's nothing like that. Hey, this is the bit."

"No, no, no, no, this is electrical. But I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity that I need."

"What did I just say?"

Catherine rewound the tape a little way.

"No, no, no, no, this is electrical. But I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity that I need," the video repeated.

"1.21 gigawatts? 1.21 gigawatts! Great Scott!"

"You can say that again," Catherine responded helpfully. Now do you see why you needed to wear...?"

But the scientist had walked over to the portraits on his wall. "How could I have been so careless? 1.21 gigawatts! Tom, how am I gonna generate that kind of power? It can't be done, it can't!" he shouted to Thomas Alva Edison. But Edison had no answer.

Catherine knew exactly how to do it. "Doc, look, all we need is a little plutonium!"

I'm sure that in 1985, plutonium is available at every corner drug store, but in 1955, it's a little hard to come by. Catherine, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you and your brother, wherever he is, are stuck here."

"Stuck?"

"Yes, stuck. Trapped. Unable to return.

"But we can't be stuck. It isn't possible. We're thirty years in the past."

"I fail to see how that has any effect on the matter."

Catherine stopped short. Honestly, there was no reason why she was protesting, apart from the fact that being stranded thirty years in the past wasn't the sort of thing that was easy to swallow, on the best of days. And this wasn't the best of days, since she hadn't slept enough due to the change of time. "Isn't there some way to return?"

"Not that I know of. The deciding factor is the power requirement of 1.21 gigawatts. Without plutonium, there is no feasible way to supply that amount of power, short of a bolt of lightning."

"Lightning?"

"Lightning isn't of any practical use, since we have no idea of where it might strike. Add to that the requirement of travelling at 88 miles per hour while simultaneously harnessing the lightning (which is a dangerous thing to mess with on the best of occasions, let alone while travelling at that sort of speed), and you have an extremely impossible task."

"Impossible, or just difficult?"

"If you could go speeding around at 88 miles per hour with a lightning rod on the car for long enough, there is a slight chance of success, but you are more likely to hit something, run out of fuel, or run out of space long before. And that's supposing you can find a decent storm."

"A storm? Oh!" Catherine dug her hands into her pockets. "It should be in here somewhere..." She rummaged through various bits of junk. "How did I end up with this?" She pulled a wallet out of the tangled collection. "This is Marty's. I think I must have picked it up without thinking when we hid the time machine.

"I suppose it is not what you were looking for?" Emmet asked.

"No... here we are! I knew I still had one on me." She located a crumpled ball of paper and tried to smooth it out a little. "Read this."

"Goldie Wilson is Mayor in the future?" Emmet was perplexed.

"No, not that bit. About the clock."

Emmet read on with an excited gleam in his eyes. "This is it. This is the answer. It says here that a bolt of lightning is gonna strike the clock-tower precisely at 10.04pm next Saturday night. If we could somehow harness this bolt of lightning, channel it into the flux capacitor, it just might work. Next Saturday night, we're sending you back to the future!"

"And Marty."

"Of course. Now, since we know exactly when and where the lightning will strike..." Emmet's voice trailed off as he drifted into a state of deep thought. "I'll need to model this."

"Great. So, I have a week. A week in the fifties."

"Yes, a week inside in the fifties."

"But I can't stay inside for a whole week."

"I'm afraid you must, for the sake of the future."

"That's not fair. Marty's who knows where, doing who knows what."

"That is beyond my control. When we locate him, he must stay inside also."

"Hmm. It won't be so bad, the two of us. Being alone's boring."

"Boring? We need to work on getting you home."

"You're the one who knows about all that. I really can't help."

"True, but there are plenty of things to do inside. Have you met Copernicus?"

"Who?"

"My dog."

"Oh, not really. I think I saw him earlier. I like dogs, but I was rather busy earlier."

"In that case, I'll introduce you. Copernicus!"

The dog instantly appeared in the doorway, wagging his tail at a furious rate.

"See, he likes you already. But it's getting late, particularly since you skipped over several hours of sleep last night, or rather you haven't had several hours sleep on October 26, 1985 yet. But you'll have those hours in a week, if I have anything to do with it. You can play with Copernicus in the morning."

"What about Marty?"

"There is nothing we can do for him at present. I'm sure he will show up. Oh, I should really find you a room. Step this way."

Catherine followed the younger version of her older friend to a guest room. She was dead tired. Her last though before falling into deep slumber was, "I wonder where Marty is sleeping. I do hope he's safe."

End Flashback

2:35 PM
Nov 16 1985
Hill Valley California

Marty pulled himself free of Bess's embrace. "You, you, you're my girlfriend?"

Bess nodded, with a look of understanding on her pretty face. "Your sister told me you seemed to be suffering from some sort of memory loss, so it's understandable for you to not remember me."

"Uh, yes, I guess so. But there's nothing really wrong with me, I just remember differently to everyone else."

"Nothing wrong with you? You didn't get hit in the head again?" Marty shook his head quizzically, so she continued with the idea, "So you remember differently because of time travel?"

Mary was shocked at her knowledge of this subject for a moment, but then he remembered a part of Doc's account of the alternate reality in which Jennifer never existed. "So you know about that?"

"Yes. I've done it myself. I suppose you want to know what's going on."

"Maybe. When a person comes home from lunch to find that everyone thinks they have been gone for three weeks, they might not be terribly eager to find out what happened to them. Maybe it's better not to know."

"I don't think it's that bad. I mean, you got back, so you're fine."

"Yeah, but I don't know where I've been, and I'm not sure if I want to."

"Don't worry, it's nothing too terrible. Catherine told me about the first part, how you got lost. It happened something like this..."

"So you hung around bored all week?" Emmet asked Catherine.

"Partly. Copernicus and I became good friends, and after a few days you let me take him for walks. I managed to ask around the neighbourhood to see if anyone had seen Marty, but no one could help me. Naturally, you found some more suitable clothes for me."

"Of course."

"You managed to scare me thoroughly by blowing up a model car in a complete replica of Courthouse Square and the surrounding streets."

"I certainly remember the look on Marty's face when I did that demonstration for him."

Catherine giggled. "I do wish I'd seen that. Then Marty would have been already found."

"So, I assume you were forced to return to 1985 without Marty."

"Yes... and no. I tried for one last-ditch effort in finding him on Saturday night. I figured that since the Enchantment Under the Sea dance was such a big event among teens our age, either he might be there, or else someone attending might have seen him. But you wouldn't let me, especially after I told you that my parents were at the dance. I had to settle for searching around the rest of the town while everyone was busy at the dance."

"How ironic. As I remember, Marty was at the dance."

"Figures. Anyhow, I managed to get to the clock-tower just before ten. I would have been there sooner, but I stopped to write you a note."

"Note?"

"Yes, I had to warn you about the Libyans. I had tried to warn you, but you wouldn't let me."

"Ah, Marty did the same thing in my memory. Continue with your story."

"I was fairly distraught over not finding Marty, but you promised that after I got safely back to the future, we could come back to look for him. That calmed me partly, but you immediately found the note I had put in your coat pocket and tore it up."

"I did that to Marty too."

"Yes, well the future didn't look good to me then. I tried to tell you straight out, but a branch pulled down the cable and..."

"I'm sure it wasn't any different to what happened with Marty. I expect you drove off to the starting line with only a few minutes to spare, and decided to come back a few minutes early to warn me."

"Yes, that is exactly what happened. Did the engine die for Marty?"

"Yes, he told me it wouldn't start until he hit his head on the steering wheel."

"I just slapped it with my hand, really hard. Anyhow, I eventually started full speed ahead for the wire, trying to make up time. Somehow I managed to hit the wire at exactly the right moment. However, when I hit the steering wheel, it must have affected the time circuits. Just before the lightning struck, I saw the displays go blank and then they flickered and scrambled the values around."

"They did?" Emmet was a little shocked by that revelation. "I'm sure that never happened to Marty. "Where did you end up? When did you end up?"

Catherine put on a dramatic voice. "There was a blinding flash, the connecting hook hit the wire, the DeLorean was going 88 miles per hour, and everything around me vanished. When my vision cleared, I could barely see anything: it was dark. I hit the breaks, and stopped. From the feel of the car, it seemed like I was on a dirt road."

"Dirt? My guess is that you ended up in the more distant past."

"That's what I thought too. I tried to look at the time circuit display, but they weren't showing anything. It seemed like there was a loose connection somewhere. I turned the DeLorean around to see what was beside me using the headlights.

I was surprised to see the courthouse, partly build."

"Partly built? I get the idea you travelled to 1885," Emmet concluded.

"Yes, but I didn't know the exact year right then. I decided I'd better get out of there. If someone in that part of history saw the DeLorean, who knows what could result?"

"So what did you do?"

"I drove quietly out of town, looking for a place to stash the DeLorean. I tried to occupy my mind so I wouldn't think about being trapped in the distant past. Finally I found a small cave and parked the time machine inside. I turned the engine off and fell asleep in the seat."

"You mean I got lost somewhere in 1955?" Marty was a little bewildered.

"Apparently," Bess answered the worried Marty. "No one knows what happened to you."

"Man, this is bad. I guess we'll never find out. Since I have totally different memories, I'll never know what happened to me either."

"That is a little scary. And you say you just had a picnic lunch in the past?"

"Yeah, that's what I said. I have no idea how this could have been caused. I mean, Catherine was born at the same time as me. How could a trip back 5 years have caused a change back then?"

"Maybe it was caused by something you did in 1955 that was different because of Catherine's interference."

"Huh?"

"You did something different in 1955 than what you remember, because Catherine was there."

"That doesn't make sense."

"Doesn't it?"

"No. Why would Catherine have been born in the first place, if it was her existence that caused her to be born?"

"Oh. That doesn't make sense. Maybe you did something in 1980 that changed what you did in 1955 and that caused Catherine to be born. And one of those caused you to get stuck in 1955."

"Hmm. That makes a little more sense," Marty answered. "Hang on." He tried to think for a moment. "If I just caused myself to get stuck in 1955, I should still be stuck there."

"Yeah?"

"Which means I shouldn't be here."

"No?"

"Which means I'm going to be erased from existence unless I fix it soon." Marty said that in a surprisingly calm voice.

"Oh! If I were you, I'd panic."

Marty panicked. "I gotta get to Doc's place!"

Just then, a car pulled into the driveway.

"Who is it now?" Marty wondered tensely.

"Probably your dad."

"I think we'd better leave before he comes in here. if don't really want to come up with a story again. Let's get out of here."

"Um, I don't know how we can get out without being seen," Bess worried.

"Nah, it's easy. You just go through the house as if you're leaving normally. I'll head out the back and jump the fence. You drive around a street and pick me up on the other side."

Bess didn't hesitate for long. "Okay, let's do it!" She vanished out the bedroom door.

"This is too weird. I wonder if this is a good idea," he thought as he slipped out the window.

His decision was justified a moment later when a male voice called out, "Marty! Hey, where is he? Son?" The voice did not belong to George McFly.

Bess noticed that Marty looked a little pale when he joined her in the car. "Is something wrong?" she asked tenderly.

"Uh, depends on how you look at it. I figure it's just another weird change caused by time travel. Say, you said you travelled through time, right?"

"Yes, I did."

"When? Why?"

"I'll tell you when we get to Doc's place. I'll fill you in on the rest of Catherine's story first. You see, when she tried to get back to 1985, something messed up with the time circuits..."