The hand, and the light, was taken away. "Are you feeling any pain?" an unfamiliar voice asked as he felt hands gently prodding around his body. Marty blinked hard, trying to clear his vision and see what the hell was going on.

"No, no... what's happening? Who are you? Where am I?"

A woman's voice answered the questions, soft and soothing in tone. "Stay calm, sir," she said. "We're just trying to make sure that you're all right. You've been through a gnarler accident."

Marty could see fuzzy forms clustering around him. He blinked a few more times and, as the spots faded, he saw he was in a sterile-looking room, lying on a hard, padded table or stretcher. Two women and two men were hovering around him. The masks concealing their noses and mouths, as well as the pristine clothing they wore, were dead giveaways; these were doctors.

"Accident?" Marty asked when the word finally penetrated his still-sleepy brain. "What accident?"

"Lie still," one of the male doctors ordered. "Let me know if you feel any pain."

Marty held his questions back and followed the instructions. The doctor seemed happy when Marty's answers. While he was distracted by that, the doctors attached some small silver sensors to the back of his hand and, once it was determined he wasn't in any outstanding pain, the medical personal examined what appeared to be readouts on a flat screen that he couldn't see from where he was.

"Amazing," he heard one of the docs comment as they stared at the screen. "Aside from a few cuts and bruises, he's fine. No internal bleeding, no broken bones...."

Marty squirmed a little on the stretcher, curious, uneasy, and a little scared. "What happened?" he asked, a frustrated note to his voice. When none of the doctors or nurses answered him immediately, he opened his mouth to repeat the question, but was stopped when one of the docs turned around and stepped to his side.

"There was a bad hovercar accident," she said. "Do you remember what happened?"

"If I did, do you think I'd be asking?" Marty snapped, irritated with the lack of clear explanations.

The man who seemed to be the main doctor, if his attitude and stance was any indication, turned around to speak with the woman at his side. "Lara, take him to the ERR," he said. "He'll be fine."

The woman nodded and started to push the table he was on. Marty looked down over the edge of it and noticed for the first time that it hovered. Then, and only then, it hit him that they were not at home and were still sometime in the future. Recalling the word accident, again, Marty felt a chill snake down his spine. He looked down at his body and saw something that nearly made his heart stop, then.

Blood was splashed over the legs of his jeans.

"Oh my God," he whispered, feeling himself pale. "There's blood on me...."

"It's not yours," the doctor said as she pushed him out of the room and down an empty hallway. "The type doesn't match, and you weren't cut that badly from the antique auto window glass."

If it's not mine, than who's is it? Marty wondered, but even as he did he knew the answer. His face paled even more at the realization, and his last memories. He had gone out to the car to wait for Doc, fallen asleep, and then....

"What happened?" Marty demanded again. When the doctor ignored his question, he reached out and grabbed hold of the doorway that they were going through, preventing the hovering table or stretcher or whatever it was from moving any farther. The doctor frowned at him, irritated.

"Please keep your hands and arms away from the edge," she said.

"No," Marty said flatly. "Tell me what happened. Where's Doc?"

"Who?"

"The guy who was driving the car. Where is he?"

The doctor's face revealed nothing. "You may see him shortly," she said. "Now, please, let go of the wall."

Marty did so reluctantly. The doctor pushed him the rest of the way into a room that looked like a very small, private waiting room. There was a couch, a flat screened television, and a small desk. The lighting was dim and soothing. The doctor maneuvered the floating stretcher into an empty portion of the room and, with a twist of a couple dials, gently lowered the height of it so that it was closer to the ground. "Wait here," she told him. "Dr. Wilson will be here shortly to close your cut."

Cut? Marty wondered. What cut? He looked down at his body again, but his stomach turned at the sight of the blood-that-was-not-his. The woman doctor left the room quickly. Marty waited only a couple seconds after her departure before carefully swinging his legs over the side of the stretcher and standing tentatively. Breath hissed out between his teeth as he moved; he felt a little sore and stiff, for some reason. He moved cautiously, testing his body, and found that aside from those complaints, he really didn't have any. There was a small restroom adjacent to the waiting room, or whatever they had put him in, and he went in there. A light came on automatically as he stepped through the doorway, startling him for a moment before he saw the mirror above the sink and his attention shifted fully to that.

"Ouch," Marty murmured to himself, seeing a number of scratches across his face. The worst was just above his right eyebrow; where there was a cut at least an inch long, fairly deep. He guessed that that was what the doctor had meant by the comment about a cut. Carefully, tentatively, he shifted his eyes to his chest and arms. The material of the long sleeved shirt looked a little dirty in some areas with grease or dust, but there were no tears or sign of injury. His hands, on the other hand, looked a little scratched up, too, with a few small nicks and cuts. The blood on the jeans disturbed him most, however, and Marty felt an icy hand clutch his heart as he stared at the stain with a kind of perverse curiosity. He touched it with the tip of his finger, carefully, and noticed it was still damp.

"Doc," he whispered, feeling sick. He reached over to the sink to turn on the water, found no knobs to do so, and then nearly jumped when the water came out automatically as his hands drifted around the tap. Quickly, he washed them, then experienced a moment of severe confusion when he couldn't find any towels, paper or otherwise, to dry his hands on. He was about to wipe them off on his shirt when his eye spotted a slot where there was a little picture of hand outlines. He put his hands in there, felt a rapid blast of heat and wind, then, when the device shut down after ten seconds, he removed his hands and found them dry.

"The future," he murmured aloud as he examined his hands, trying to remind himself that he wasn't in 1991 anymore. He left the restroom and sat down on the couch, nervous and edgy. His eyes drifted to the flat screen on the wall, currently displaying a picture of rotating globe. Having seen such things before turn out to be televisions, Marty got up and looked around for a switch or remote. When he couldn't find one and remembered that sometimes things were voice activated now, he said, "Turn on."

Nothing. Marty tried again. "Turn on, television."

The screen flickered ,then produced a startlingly crisp picture of what Marty could only assume was a local channel. "Turn to a news channel," he said, hoping that would get him what it wanted.

The image flickered, then was replaced by what seemed to be a local news program. The woman seated at the anchor desk looked naggingly familiar, but he wasn't given much time to dwell on that.

"Our top story this afternoon," the woman -- who had to be in her forties, at least, by the looks of it -- said, "is a hovercar accident on the skyway that has left five people injured."

Marty leaned forward as the screen changed, showing pan of a skyway. "According to police reports, thirty-two-year-old Mitchell Vincent Robertson, who had been arrested on embezzlement charges, stole a police hovercar from the Metro West Police Station and provoked a chase that led to Skyway I-99, above the greater Hill Valley area."

The picture changed again to what appeared to be surveillance footage of the skyway. The newswoman's voice -- who was she, anyway? The solution continued to dance out of Marty's grasp -- continued to narrate as a parade of rapid images danced on the screen. "Shortly before three P.M. this afternoon, Robertson's chase ended when he clipped a car--" Marty gasped when he saw a car zip on screen that looked just like the illusion Doc had put on the DeLorean for their time in the future "--and sent it into a spin, where it caused a brief chain reaction of collisions." The footage showed the DeLorean-disguised- as-a-sportscar being slammed into from the back when the flying cop car cut a lane change too fast. The hidden DeLorean started to spin across the four lanes of traffic, was hit by another car, and then slid, hard, right into one of those lane dividers that split the flow of traffic. At the second blow, the illusion of the sports car flickered, then vanished entirely, leaving a badly mangled DeLorean in sight. As he watched, the car then started to drop, down, until it was out of view of the camera.

"Oh Jesus," Marty whispered, unable to take his eyes off the screen. He started to shake, cold, suddenly, from deep within. He had been in that car, too!

"The five injured in the accident were rushed to the Hill Valley Community Hospital, where their conditions ranged from bumps and bruises to critical. The identity of those involved has not been released until family members can be contacted. Robertson was arrested on the ground scene--" The screen showed a scowling man being shoved into a cop car. "--and changed with crimes of classes D and H. He, and the Hill Valley Police Department, have also reached settlements with those involved with the accident."

The anchor desk appeared on the screen once again, showing both the woman and a man of approximately her age at her side. "That's pretty fantastic no one was hurt, Jennifer," the man said.

And then everything clicked for Marty. He gasped and nearly fell off the couch, his body having to sustain too many shocks in too short of a period. "Jennifer? Oh my God!"

But there could be no doubt. The anchorwoman was his fiancee, Jennifer Parker. The way she would appear at age sixty-two.

As he struggled to take that in, and accept the news that had just been relayed, the door opened and a man who could only be a doctor came into the room. "Sorry to keep you waiting," he said, sounding indeed remorseful. "We've had some excitement today."

"I guess so," Marty answered numbly, still staring in shock at the television. The doctor ordered it to turn off, then took the chair from the desk and sat before the reeling young man.

"I'm Doctor Wilson," he said. "I'm going to be mending your cut today. Still feeling pain free?"

"Uh-huh." Marty watched as the doctor opened up what looked to be a handheld kit of some kind that he had carted in. "What happened to the other guy I was with?"

"A white haired gentleman, approximately sixty?" Dr. Wilson asked.

Although they had grossly misjudged Doc's age -- maybe the rejuvenation stuff he'd been doing on a semi-regular basis in the future had something to do with that -- Marty nodded. "Yeah. Is he -- is he okay?"

"He's upstairs resting after some osteosurgrey. Are you family?" The question was asked lightly, casually, but Marty sensed there was something more behind that.

"Why?"

"Hold still, now." The doctor brought up something that looked sort of like a small magnifying glass, except made from silver, with a pointed tip jutting out at the end. Marty had no idea what the instrument did but held still as the doctor approached the cut on his face with it. "You've just had us all taking bets. You don't find too many people without print records."

Marty would have frowned had he not been afraid of interfering with what the doctor was doing to his cut. "Print records?" he asked, hoping it wasn't too stupid of a question.

"Yes... you do know that by 2010 it was required by law to have a medical account set up with your thumbprint. I've found very few people to not have one. Those that don't are usually visitors from other countries. But you sound American to me, unless my ears are 'bibbing me."

The lie was out before Marty could stop it. "We're Canadian," he said, praying that the Canadian government didn't have a similar policy -- and that there was still such a country, too, which might've not been so anymore, for all he knew.

"Ah. Then I suppose that would explain it." The doctor drew back his instrument. "There you go. All done."

Marty blinked, amazed. He hadn't felt anything, really. "That's it? I thought I'd need stitches."

Dr. Wilson chuckled. "Stitches? They haven't been used for years! Too much scarring."

Even more confused now, but deciding to put off any looks in the mirror for later, Marty brought the topic back to the subject that most concerned him. "How is Do-- ah, the older guy?"

"He suffered a broken arm, three cracked ribs, a torn ligament to his knee, numerous bruises and cuts, including a rather nasty laceration to his cheek, and a serious concussion," the doctor said.

"Oh God," Marty whispered. "Is he going to be okay?"

"Oh, certainly. The osteosurgrey repaired the damage on the bones, his knee was fixed up by NIHT, and we'll be repairing the concussion with nanosurgery shortly. He'll need a couple days in the hospital to recover from that, barring any complications, of course, but I don't think he'll be here past Saturday."

Marty blinked a couple times, trying to understand what the doctor was saying to him. "So he's going to be okay?" he asked again.

Dr. Wilson smiled, standing. "Yes, he'll be fine."

Marty exhaled deeply, leaning forward to rest his head in his hands for a moment. "Oh, thank God." Then a new thought occurred to him, mighty disquieting. "How, uh... how is this being paid for?"

"The settlement is taking care of it, unless you have insurance coverage that you'd prefer we use instead."

Marty stood as the doctor did. "Settlement?" he asked, having heard a mention of that once before, in the news segment. "What settlement?"

"The settlement that the courts have decided to award the five involved in the accident," Dr. Wilson said, as if this was completely normal. Well, Marty supposed, hadn't Doc once mentioned that courts moved fast in the future, due to an absence of lawyers? "With ten million per person, plus the value of the vehicles damaged, there should be more than enough money for the medical expenses."

Marty's eyes bugged out. "Te-- ten million dollars?" he repeated, not sure that he'd heard right.

"Yes, so you and your friend -- what is his name? -- should get a sum of ten million each, combined with the value of the car. And seeing that you were in a vintage 1982 DeLorean, that's another six million right there."

Marty's mind struggled to make sense of the amount of money that the guy was talking about. It was just too much, though, with everything else that he'd had to deal with in the last twenty minutes alone. He felt overwhelmingly dizzy, like he was going to faint. "Twenty-six million dollars," he mumbled aloud. "I -- I gotta sit down...."

But he never quite made it to a chair.

* * *

After the terrible sensations of crashing, of falling, and of pain, there passed an undeterminable length of time where Doc was just... floating. He wasn't sure where he was or what was going on, but the lack of knowledge didn't really disturb him. Sometimes it was good to just go with the flow, as it were, with no worries or pressures bearing down on him.

But the sensation didn't last forever. All too soon Doc found himself creeping back towards awareness. There were dull aches in his body, and those, more than anything else, dragged him back to full consciousness. Before he opened his eyes, he took a blind inventory of his surroundings. Silence pretty much surrounded him, so far as he could tell. He seemed to be lying down, a pillow under his head and blankets over him. Was he at home in bed? The thought, tempting as it was, didn't feel quite accurate. The house was never this quiet, not unless Clara and all the kids were out. And things just felt... wrong. Different.

Well, the scientist thought, bracing himself, I suppose there's one way to find out what's what.

He opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was a large screen suspended on the wall across from where he lay, showing a field of wildflowers. The image was so crisp, so clear that Doc first thought he was looking out a window. But that belief was squelched almost immediately as he turned his head tentatively to the left and saw other contents of the room. Although the wallpaper, the furnishings, and the lighting all seemed to argue he was in a hotel room, the medical IV line that led into the back of his hand, as well as the flat screen monitor next to it that traced his pulse and other readings were strong indications that he was in a hospital. But one that he had not seen the likes of before.

What happened? he wondered, feeling the first clear stirrings of unease. Doc's mind continued to tally up what he saw and he reached a disturbing conclusion -- during the trip he remembered taking Marty on to 2030, something had happened, landing him in the hospital. But what? Had it been a medical problem, such as a heart attack or stroke? Lord knew that he was at the age for such a thing, though he had been exceptionally careful about taking care of himself, a regiment that included regular visits to the doctor -- including doctors in the future. Or had there been an accident? A scan of his memories told him nothing; last he remembered he had been driving on the skyway and trying to brainstorm ways to get through to Jules so the kid would stop being so damned disobedient.

And where was Marty, now?

Doc turned his head to the right, hoping to spot a doorway where he could perhaps call out to someone, and saw something even better. Next to his bed, sacked out in a recliner, was Marty. From the way he was sitting -- with his head propped back at an awkward-looking angle -- it looked to Doc as if he had dozed off while waiting for him to wake up. The scientist looked at him critically, searching for a sign or indication that might tell him what happened. Almost immediately he saw something that caused his heart to skip -- there were dark bloodstains splattered across his jeans. He could only assume that they did not belong to the young man because, so far as he could tell, Marty wasn't hurt in any visible manner. And logic argued that if he had been hurt, especially to spill that much blood, his friend would be in a hospital bed himself.

An accident, Doc concluded, and was about to open his mouth at ask Marty what had happened when the door to his room opened and a nurse bustled in.

"How you feeling now?" she asked pleasantly. At the sound of her voice, Marty jerked awake, almost falling out of the chair. He looked up at the nurse with a fuzzy, sleepy look, then turned his head and saw Doc awake. His eyes widened, but he said nothing.

"All right, I suppose," Doc said slowly, testing his voice. Aside from sounding a tad groggy and dry, it seemed no different. "What happened?"

The nurse rounded the end of the bed to look at the flat screen that was monitoring his vitals. "You were in a bad hovercar accident on the skyway," she explained. "You arrived in bad shape, but you should be fine now."

If the stains on Marty's clothes were his, then Doc didn't doubt her assessment. He glanced at his body in the bed and, aside from the too thin hospital gown they had put him in, saw nothing more amiss than a hard bandage on his left arm. "How was I injured?" he asked.

"The doctor will be with you shortly to explain everything," the nurse said. She touched the monitor a couple times to make some adjustments, then left, closing the door behind her. Doc looked to Marty, who was staring at him with a very odd look on his face that the scientist didn't think he'd ever seen before.

"You're okay?" Marty asked softly. "I was worried you'd be in a coma."

Doc bit back the question on the tip of his tongue -- that being, "Why?" -- in favor of more pressing concerns. "Were you hurt?"

Marty shook his head slowly. "I don't think so. Just some cuts and some bruises that are starting to ache like crazy, but nothing worse. But I don't know for sure, since I woke up here, already in the hospital." He paused, then added softly, almost under his breath. "I slept through the whole thing."

"There was a car accident, I've gathered," Doc said, the realization and consequences finally dawning on him. He felt himself pale. "The DeLorean... how does it look?"

Marty lifted up his shoulders in a shrug, though he looked depressed enough that additional warning bells started to go off in the inventor's head. "I think it's pretty well totaled, Doc," he said softly, looking like he was about to cry. "I saw the news this afternoon and they had a story about the accident and showed what happened." He swallowed hard, blinking rapidly for a moment. "The DeLorean looked like a crumpled tin can -- and that was before it fell to the ground."

Doc exhaled slowly, leaning back into the pillow. He didn't say anything immediately, trying to understand fully what Marty was telling him. There was a chance that the DeLorean could be salvaged, but Doc had a horrible feeling that the chance was about as good as finding buried treasure in his backyard. Even a fender bender could foul things up for the DeLorean in terms of it's ability to travel through time. And, worse yet, no one knew they were here! Clara had known where he was going only in that it was in "the future," and the pagers that Doc had rigged to the time circuits as a failsafe on the chance a time machine went out and never returned -- or, worse yet, were stolen -- were currently on top of his desk in the lab, waiting for new batteries that he'd intended to pick up the next day.

The thoughts flirted through his head in seconds, but he remained so preoccupied by them that he was silent for more than a full minute. Marty finally broke it, and he was clearly scared. "Doc, what's wrong?"

"What isn't wrong?" was the inventor's unusually pessimistic response. Without bothering to answer his own question, not wanting to send Marty panicking just quite yet, he asked the young man to tell him everything he had seen and heard since their arrival in the hospital. Marty relayed how he had woken up in the hospital, been taken to another room where he caught a news report, and how a doctor had finally visited him to close up a cut on his forehead.

"That guy also told me a couple things, one that you may or may not find interesting, and something else that I think you definitely will."

Doc looked at him curiously. "What would these be?"

Marty frowned. "For some reason -- and I think this is a good thing, actually -- we aren't in any computers. I guess all people now are required to have medical records or something that can be accessed by a thumbprint, but they ran ours in a computer and we didn't pop up."

Doc's face paled once more so fast that Marty stood, alarmed. "Doc, are you okay? Do you need me to get someone?"

The scientist managed to shake his head, though he felt anything but okay. "Are you telling me that we have no records on file?" he asked, wanting to be sure of what Marty was telling him. "That we have no identities here and no one knows who we are?"

Marty nodded. "That's about right. But I think that's a good thing, since wouldn't that cause problems for the uses in the future? The hospital isn't like that clinic you took me to, that treats people without question and all that stuff."

Doc took a breath and let it out, allowing himself to sink deeper into the bedding. "It's not a good thing," he said at last.

"Why not?" Marty sat down suddenly, his posture one of someone who was expecting to get smacked in the face with bad news. Unfortunately, that's what he was going to get.

"If we are not on any computers or files, if our prints do not show up with records, it means that, here, there are no versions of us." At Marty's look of confusion, Doc tried to clarify. "If I'm remembering my future history correctly, around 2010 a law was enforced that required all Americans to get fingerprinted and create medical accounts and records that could be brought up by one's thumbprint. It saved one from filling out a ton of paperwork every time they visited a doctor, and had the added advantage of providing doctors immediate medical information in emergency situations."

"Okay," Marty said slowly. "But... but if we weren't alive now, wouldn't we still have records, even if..." He swallowed hard. "Even if we'd died?"

"But we haven't died, exactly." Doc took another breath and concluded, very softly, "What I believe this means is that we've been gone since before 2010, both of us. And, considering the present condition of the DeLorean, I think it means that we never came home from this trip, back to 1991. I think it's telling us that the accident caused irreparable damage to the time machine. And that damage has trapped us here."

Marty stared at Doc through narrowed eyes. "So, you're saying that we're stuck here? We're stuck in the future?"