Back To The Future || Part Zero

Chapter Two

The man and woman were really going at it now, breathing hard and moaning. Typical sounds of sex. Marty watched for a moment, then shook his head and turned away from the porno video he was copying for his friend. Twisting the volume down as the couple started to get really noisy, he fished some cash out of his pocket and placed it in the cigar box where he was storing all the money he was saving to use for that new amp. He got up from his chair and walked out of the room into Professor Brown's lab.

The Professor was lying on his cot, asleep, with a heavy blanket covering him. Marty walked quietly over to the refrigerator and opened it, taking out a bottle of Coke. As he was pulling the soft drink out, his hand accidentally bumped against an orange lying beside it. Before he had a chance to catch it, it bounced out of the fridge and rolled across the floor, vanishing under the cot.

Marty set down the Coke on top of the fridge and bent down to picked the orange up. He pushed aside the blanket and saw a crate, purple radioactive emblems on it. Marty frowned as he read the labels. Extreme Danger! Radioactive Plutonium! Authorized Personal Only! Do Not Handle Without Radiation Suit. Near the bottom were the words, "Property of San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, San Onofre, California."

Right next to the word "California" was the orange. Taking a deep breath, Marty stood up and kicked the orange out from under the cot with his right foot. He slowly backed away, his eyes on the crate, before picking the orange up and tossing it into the trash can next to the refrigerator. Marty glanced at the Professor, relieved to see that he hadn't woken up.

Trying to forget what he had seen, Marty picked the Coke bottle up and twisted the cap off, taking a quick swig from it before walking over to a cage with an organ-grinder monkey in it.

"Hey, Shemp," he called softly. "How ya doin'?"

The monkey gazed back at him with dark eyes. Marty unlatched the cage door and let the animal out. Shemp quickly climbed up his arm and sat on his shoulder. Marty crossed the room, over to the table where the power converter was still set up, resting on some old blueprints. He leaned over for a closer look at those.

The top blueprint was for something called, "Photo-Electric Chemical Power Converter." The sketch on the blueprint matched the power converter that the Professor had been messing with earlier. Marty flipped that blueprint back to look at the others one-by-one. "15 Tube Mechanical Home Butler." It looked like some kind of robot. "Aero-Mobile," a weird-looking flying car. And a "Write-O-Matic," which looked like a pen with a suction cup at the end of an attached wire.

Marty let the blueprints flip back and stared at the power onverter. The last few rays of the afternoon sunlight filtered through the skylight and shone down on the photo-cell. Marty looked closer and noticed a funnel shaped thingy jutting out of the chemical chamber. He looked at it for a moment, temptation building, then reached over and poured some of the Coke in the funnel.

He hadn't even pulled his arm back when a bright spark shot out of the opposite end of the device, making a loud cracking noise. Marty jumped several feet away, his heart pounding, almost dropping the bottle in his hand.

"What happened?!" he heard Professor Brown demand, jumping out of his bed and running over to the table where the power converter sat.

"Well, I'm not sure exactly -- I accidentally spilled some Coke in here," Marty said, stretching the truth a little. He pointed to the funnel. "Just a drop!"

The Professor quickly hooked up the voltmeter and light bulb to the converter. "Give me that!" he added, snatching the bottle from Marty's hands. He poured some more of the drink into the funnel. The bulb started glowing brightly and the meter jumped. The whole thing started to make a humming noise. Professor Brown dumped in more Coke. The light grew even brighter, then suddenly exploded!