Batman 4 - Batman & Robin (30 page)

Batman was sliding helplessly toward the slot in the observatory dome—the one through which the telescope projected. He could see the lights of Gotham along the river far below.

He wasn’t going to die that way, he told himself. Not tonight. He had too much to do, too many people depending on him.

As Batman slipped out into the night, a frigid wind whipping at him, he pressed his cheek, his gloves, his knees against the barrel of the telescope. Gradually, inch by painful inch, he slowed himself—until it looked like he might have a fighting chance of surviving this.

But the end was looming—literally. Another few feet and he’d go plummeting the way Robin and Batgirl had plummeted. Except with the direction in which the telescope was pointed now, there would be no city beneath him—only the jagged rocks by the river.

Come on,
Batman told himself, the wind shrieking all around him.
Come on.

And then, miracle of miracles, he stopped himself—less than a foot from the bitter end. He took a breath, let it out.

“Wow,” said a nearby voice, just audible over the howling of the wind. “Batman.”

He turned and saw the two observatory scientists clinging to a targeting groove along the body of the telescope. They looked frazzled but secure enough. And his presence seemed to have had a calming influence.

“I’ve seen you on TV” one of them said. “Something that
might
have been you, anyway. My friends told me you didn’t exist.”

Batman glanced down the length of the telescope barrel. At the other end, Freeze was working his way back to the control panel. Knowing how little time he had, the crime fighter glanced at the scientists again.

“Can you give me any more height on this thing?” he asked.

One of the scientists reached down and grabbed a red emergency lever. “Going up,” he said.

Then he pulled the lever and the telescope swung straight up, sending Batman soaring through the frigid night toward the stately observatory dome. Flipping in midair, he aimed for the slot made for the telescope . . .

. . . and Freeze, who was visible through the aperture.

But he wasn’t going to make it. The Dark Knight could see that with his practiced eye. He was going to fall short of the opening, if only by a few inches. And in this case, a miss was as good as a mile.

Then he remembered something someone had taught him once. A young athlete, with his perfect life stretched out ahead of him, had shared with him his secret strategy in the long jump—a strategy that had won him the decathlon at the Olympic Games.

“I don’t land,” he had said. “I just
hang
there.”

Batman concentrated on that. He focused on it as hard as he’d focused on anything in his life. And just as that young athlete had recommended, he didn’t land. He just
hung
there . . .

. . . and hung there . . .

. . . and hung there some more . . .

. . . long enough to make it through the slot and come down on the man who’d given him that advice.

Unable to stand under the weight of Batman’s descent, Freeze crashed over the edge of the control platform and into the freezing engine. In the process, his antithermal suit was ripped open.

In that moment, despite the villain’s best efforts, the mirrors overhead moved into alignment. The beams of reflected sunlight hit the freezing engine. And Freeze was struck by the rays as well, forced to watch as they penetrated his damaged suit.

The telescope was alive with power all of a sudden, an intense thawing beam shooting from its giant lens. Batman turned to Freeze, who was beginning to turn gray and wither.

“You’re losing your cool,” he said.

Freeze’s lip curled in disdain. “I think not. There’ll be no hot time in this old town tonight.” He produced a remote control device. “You’ll get a charge out of this, my friend.”

Pressing a button on the device, he rolled out of the sunlight and fell to the floor. Suddenly, a series of explosions in quick succession wracked the area around the base of the telescope. And with each rapid-fire impact, the giant instrument tore loose of its moorings a little more.

Finally, with a scream of twisting metal and cracking concrete, it slid through its slot altogether, taking Batman, the telescope platform, and a chunk of observatory floor along with it—not to mention the two scientists clinging to the targeting groove.

Together, they began to fall, headed for the frozen river-bank and certain death on the rocks below.

As the wind ripped past him, stinging his eyes mercilessly, Batman’s first thought was to get to the scientists. If he could reach them, he might be able to save their lives.

Sliding down the telescope from the control platform—yet again—he simultaneously sought out the one structure he knew he could count on.

And found it.

Aiming the launcher mounted on his wrist, he fired a double-ended Bat-tether and watched twin grapples shoot horizontally into the air . . . then sink into the arms of the giant sculpture holding up the observatory as the telescope plummeted past.

Batgirl was just helping Robin onto an icy ledge beneath the slot in the observatory dome when they heard—no, felt—a series of explosions. A moment later, the giant telescope, carrying Batman and two other men, plunged past them.

“Now, that,” said her companion, his voice taut with concern, “is what I call an exit.”

The sight of their friend and two innocents falling to their deaths was a compelling, even horrific spectacle. But Batgirl had barely noticed it before something else captured her attention.

Looking past Robin, she cursed softly. “Please tell me he’s on our side,” she said, gazing at the mammoth, muscle-bound monstrosity.

But with his leather mask and the tubes leading from the back of his head, he didn’t look like anyone she wanted to meet in a dark alley, much less in the skies over Gotham.

“His name is Bane,” said Robin.

He coiled and leaped into a spinning roundhouse kick. But the man called Bane knocked him away with a back-handed blow, sending him flying into a snowdrift.

Then the giant began advancing on Batgirl.

She went into a flurry of action, letting Bane have it with a series of punches and kicks. Her whole arsenal, in fact. Unfortunately, it didn’t do any good. He might as well have been made of steel.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Robin stand up. “Don’t worry,” she grunted. “I’ve got him.”

Just then, Bane grabbed her by the throat and slammed her into an ice wall. Her senses left her for a moment. When they came back again, she could taste blood in her mouth—and see Bane bringing his fist back in preparation for a killing blow.

“No,” she heard Robin say.
“I’ve
got him.”

Turning, she saw her companion leap into the air—and rip away the tubes connecting Bane’s injector pack to the back of his skull. As the tubes flapped about, a milky substance sprayed wildly into the air, hissing where it made contact with the snow.

Bane released Batgirl and hit the ledge, writhing. He seemed to be getting smaller, less muscular, as she looked on—shrinking, amazing as it sounded. After just a few seconds, the man was a scrawny shadow of his former self, struggling in the folds of his costume.

“You should get that suit taken in,” Robin gibed as he grabbed a fistful of Bane’s vest. “No one’s buying baggy anymore.”

As Batman clung to the telescope, he saw the jagged rocks alongside the river rush up at him with dizzying speed. But if he was discomfited by the sight, the scientists were absolutely terrified.

“Grab my belt,” he roared over the rush of the wind, “and hang on.”

Frantic with fear, the scientists did as they were told. In fact, they were only too glad to latch on to something, anything, no matter how fragile a chance it might be.

A moment later, Batman’s grappling cable pulled taut.

The crime fighter felt a tremendous jolt of pain in his right shoulder as he assumed the weight of three grown men, the telescope dropping out beneath them like the trapdoor in a giant gallows.

As Batman and the scientists continued to sink, bending the cable like a bowstring in the hands of a titanic archer, the pain in his shoulder became an electric agony.

But still he held on, jaw clenched, fighting his way past his misery until the three of them reached their lowest point—over an outcropping of rock on the cliff face below the observatory.

Below, the telescope hit the rocks and exploded in a conflagration that threw the cliffs into stark relief. For a split second, Batman experienced a pang of grief for the thing. He—or rather, Bruce Wayne—had meant it to be a symbol of hope. And now it was dashed.

But it was just a symbol. Batman wouldn’t believe
real
hope had died along with it.

“This is your stop,” he told the scientists.

Freeing himself from their grasps, first one and then the other, he saw them drop safely onto a ledge just a few feet below them. Then, the weight on it reduced dramatically, Batman felt the cable go taut again—propelling him back up toward the observatory like a straight, dark arrow.

Once again, his shoulder was punished—this time by the force of acceleration. Once again, it stood the test.

The Batman soared toward the thickening, gray clouds, past the mammoth statue holding up the observatory. At precisely the right moment, he pressed a stud on his wrist-launcher and allowed the cable ends to spring free.

Then he continued his flight unrestricted. Almost immediately, he could feel gravity resume its claim on him. But by then, he was already shooting past the observatory.

Knowing he would have only one chance to perform this maneuver, Batman concentrated on getting it right. As he ascended past the observatory, he twisted in midair and spread his cape, using every tool at his disposal to change the direction of his flight.

Then, with an ease that belied the magnitude of his effort, he flipped neatly through the slot formerly occupied by the telescope and landed on the observatory floor.

And he wasn’t alone. No sooner had he completed his vault than he saw Robin and Batgirl flip through the slot as well. They had made it
—all
of them.

Robin grinned. “Winded, old-timer?”

Batman didn’t give him the satisfaction of frowning at him. “Don’t make me kill you in front of the girl,” he said.

As one, they approached the rubble-strewn control console. Its chronometer was still intact. But the news it gave them wasn’t good.

“It’s almost midnight,” Batgirl pointed out. “And the telescope’s gone. There’s no way to thaw the city.”

Batman stroked his chin. There
was
a way, he insisted, wracking his brain for one. There was
always
a way.

Then he hit on it.

“Theoretically,” he said, “the satellites could be positioned to thaw the city directly. But it would take a computer genius.” He eyed his companions. “Know anyone who fits that description?”

“I’m on it,” said Robin.

Clearing the debris away from the console, he began to type. But to no avail. The equipment was dead inside.

“No,” said Batgirl, shouldering Robin aside.
“I’m
on it.”

She located a couple of broken wires and quick-patched them. Suddenly, the console sprang to life. Without missing a beat, she began hacking.

“Ms. Genius,” she muttered, without looking up. “Madame Genius. Her Geniusness. Which sounds better?”

Batman took a closer look at the monitor. According to the graphics, the giant orbital satellites were beginning to align.

He imagined a full disk of the sun appearing in the mirror of one satellite. He imagined that solar energy reflected from the first satellite to the second one, and then to the one after that and the one after that, until the last unit in the string beamed a ray of hot, pure sunlight at Gotham.

Suddenly, Batman saw a glint in the dense, gray sky, an ember of faith among the ashes of his city’s despair. As he watched, the ember became a glow, then a narrow, red-gold shaft of light. Then several shafts of light, cutting through the cloud cover like a celestial cavalry.

The giant rays of focused sunlight played over the city. And whatever they touched, they warmed. Slowly, inexorably, life was restored to the frozen canyons of Gotham.