How You Get There (short story)

Summary
After visiting a man named Emmett at a mental institution, the Doctor heads out to catch a bus as it starts to rain. While waiting, he strikes up a conversation with an elderly woman named Elsie, explains to her why buses seem to come in clumps of three, and cheers her up by asking about her ill husband at the hospital and listening to what she has to say. He also cheers up a young boy and his single mother on the bus by performing impossible magic tricks for them. As the rain grows worse and weird pink lightning crashes up out of the Millbank Tower offices, the Doctor keeps the passengers’ minds off things by organising a sing-along; a young teenager who’d been listening to punk music joins in, strikes up a conversation with a young girl, and leaves the bus with her when it’s forced off the road by the increasingly nasty weather.

The Doctor runs across Vauxhall Bridge on foot before it collapses and makes it to the Tower, where Benny and Ross Brimmicombe-Wood of UNIT are being held at gunpoint by a crazed scientist named Endwell -- a climatologist whose warnings about global warming have been ignored, and who has resorted to desperate measures using Emmett’s weather-control machine to attract attention. When Endwell tries to shoot the Doctor, Benny throws her handbag at him, but misses and hits the window; the window shatters, and the storm plucks Endwell out to his death. The Doctor nearly goes out the window as well, but Benny manages to pull the correct wires out of the weather-control machine, shutting it down. Endwell’s followers, ordinary scientists who are all rather ashamed that things have gone this far, help to clean up the mess afterwards, and Benny realises that it’s the little acts of kindness such as this that really make a difference.

Characters

 * Seventh Doctor
 * Bernice Summerfield

Continuity
to be added