Batman Versus Three Villains of Doom

by Winston Lyon

  Batman moved like a man in a trance. At the top he stepped off the ladder and stood still, while Scotty Tucker and another of the Joker’s henchmen bound him to the post that supported the huge ball overhead.

  “You got any last words, Batman?” Scotty asked when he had finished. “Now’s the time to say them.”

  Batman’s eyes were distant, and sad. He merely shook his head.

  Scotty and his fellow henchman began to descend the ladder, leaving Batman alone on his unprotected height.

  Scotty said, “He sure is taking this lying down. Batman’s a real spineless jellyfish!”

  “The Joker had his number all along,” said the other.

  “Yeah. I guess he did.”

  Scotty and the other henchman joined the Joker in position behind the safety of the high wire netting.

  The Joker gave a signal to another henchman waiting at the controls.

  “All right,” he said. “Throw the switch.”

  The giant room began to hum with droning electrical power. As the dynamo fed the positive electrode, the copper tower began to spark and crackle with flashes from its increasing electrical potential. As soon as the charge built to a sufficient degree there would be a release of energy—a flash of terrible destroying lightning across from the positive electrode to the negative one. The principle was the same as that which created nature’s own lightning: a discharge of electrical energy from a cloud with a high electrical potential to another cloud or to the earth.

  Nearer and nearer came the moment. In less than a minute an awesome and terrible discharge of power would rend its way through the room—and shrivel Batman to a lifeless cinder! The Joker’s white face shone in the reflected glow as the electrical charge built up. His wide lips parted over prominent square teeth and his eyes reflected the small curving, dancing, jagged flashes that began arcing about the giant positive electrode a short distance from the Batman.

  Some of the crackling power in the room seemed to enter the Joker’s own body—stiffening it with excitement.

  And why not? He was on the eve of the greatest moment of his career—a moment he would cherish for the rest of his nefarious life.

  In seconds the Joker’s dream would be realized.

  He would witness the death of Batman!

  On the top ridge of the negative electrode, Batman became slowly aware of his danger. He raised his head and looked around him. For the first time he understood the terrible fate that awaited him. He struggled against his bonds.

  Too late! He was held fast. The doom the Joker had prepared was now only a few heartbeats away.

  The Joker’s laugh rang out. It was savage anticipatory laughter—meant to join in and be drowned out by the cataclysmic roar of the lightning.

  “Hyaaa-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

  Nothing happened. The Joker’s laughter continued, echoing with an empty sound in the abandoned auditorium.

  All other noise had stopped.

  Then the Joker’s laughter ceased. He whirled on Scotty Tucker.

  “The dynamo isn’t building up energy in the electrode. What’s wrong?”

  “I dunno, Boss!”

  “Get up to the control booth. Find out! If that dolt up there lets anything happen to spoil my big moment…”

  Scotty started up toward the control booth, climbing hand over hand up the ladder toward it.

  Before he reached the booth, a flashing figure catapulted down, carrying Scotty Tucker with him.

  They crashed heavily to the flooring below, Scotty on the bottom. The impact knocked him cold.

  The Joker’s incredulous voice rang with alarm.

  “ROBIN!”

  “In person,” Robin said.

  He vaulted over a table to crash feet-first into the Joker.

  The Crime Clown went reeling back to the protective wire netting.

  “Shoot him!” the Joker yelled. “Shoot, you fools!”

  The Joker’s henchmen opened fire. Shots crashed through the air and the echoes reverberated in the huge auditorium. But Robin was a quickly moving target. Before anyone realized what was happening, he was on the platform, scaling the zinc tower to where Batman was bound.

  “Don’t let him reach Batman,” the Joker shouted. “KIILL HIM!”

  Up the forty-foot height of the electrode went the Boy Wonder. Batman watched him approach with unbelieving eyes. Not until he felt Robin’s hands at work on his bonds did he seem to realize this was really the Boy Wonder.

  “Robin,” he whispered. “You’re alive.”

  “Neither of us will be for long, Batman,” Robin said, “unless we get out of the line of fire.”

  A bullet ricocheted off the zinc side of the electrode and whined off into space.

  Batman said, “How did you manage to do it? I thought you were…”

  WHANG-SPAT!

  Another bullet kicked paint off the post near the spot where Batman had been bound.

  “I think explanations ought to come later, don’t you, Batman?” Robin inquired.

  Batman laughed, and his voice had its old thrilling note of authority. “Get back behind the tower, Robin! Quickly!”

  The Joker and his henchmen kept blasting away, but for the moment Batman and Robin were safe—hidden behind the giant cathode tower.

  “Around this way,” the Joker commanded his men. “We’ll get a better line of fire.”

  He crossed to a better vantage point at the wire protective netting. From this angle he could see the other side of the electrode.

  The Joker gave a start.

  “Where are they?”

  Neither Batman nor Robin were visible on the far side.

  “They couldn’t have disappeared into thin air,” the Joker said.

  His answer came unexpectedly—from thin air.

  “Who says we can’t?”

  Swinging on the Batropes, Batman and Robin plummeted directly down toward the wire netting behind which the Joker and his men were stationed.

  “Now’s the time for a little action,” Batman called out.

  The Joker and his men began to run.

  The momentum of Batman and Robin’s plunge carried them into the top of the wire netting. The poles swayed, and then began to topple, carrying the netting with them.

  “LOOK OUT!” yelled the Joker.

  The entire netting came down—on top of the Joker’s men who were pinned beneath it. The Joker scrambled free. Batman and Robin landed lightly on their feet nearby.

  The Joker flung his gun at Batman. The next instant Batman’s thundering fist turned him completely around in his tracks and dropped him senseless.

  “Shall we wrap the others up now, Batman?” Robin asked with a grin.

  Batman turned to Robin to answer, and for a moment he could not speak. He reached out to touch Robin’s arm—just touch it. There was a mistiness in his eyes.

  Then he managed to match Robin’s grin. “With a pink or a blue ribbon?” he asked.

  Dick Grayson did a double backflip through the air.

  His small, muscular, compact body rolled up like a ball as he whirled backward heels over head, somersaulting without touching the ground.

  At the final instant when Dick should have straightened to land on his feet he performed an amazing feet of gymnastics.

  Instead of coming out of the backflip to land on his feet he made his body as horizontally rigid as a board. And he passed right under the leaf of a long table in the library of Wayne Manor.

  As his body passed beneath the tabletop, his fingers reached up to grip the table edge and he hung suspended there.

  Bruce Wayne broke into applause.

  “That’s the best gymnast’s trick I’ve seen in some time,” he said. “Where did you learn it, Dick? I never taught that one to you.”

  Dick stood up, smiling. “It’s something I just picked up.”

  “When?”

  “I can tell you the instant I mastered it, Bruce. Approximately two seconds after I jumped down so reckl
essly on the dummy I thought was the Joker.”

  Alfred, the butler, who had been listening with Bruce Wayne, looked mildly astonished.

  “Master Grayson, what a curious time to practice gymnast’s tricks!”

  “I wasn’t practicing,” Dick said. “As a matter of fact, Alfred, this was a matter of life—and death. When I touched that Joker dummy, I knew I’d been tricked. I was ready for almost anything to follow. I wasn’t surprised when the floor gave way under me.”

  “What did you do, Master Grayson?”

  “I knew that whatever was down in that hole wasn’t there to do me any good. So I flung myself into the backflip just as I went down in it. I straightened out below the floor as it came down over me and caught hold of the edge with my fingers.

  Then I hung on. There was enough of a crack at the edge of that fake flooring for me to get a grip. And the rug that the Joker used to cover the trapdoor helped too. It concealed the grip I had on the edge of the flooring.”

  “How did you get out of there, Dick?” Bruce Wayne asked.

  “I hung on for a few minutes until my eyes adjusted and I saw the vat of liquid below me. I didn’t know what it was, but to test it I dropped a metal buckle from my utility belt into it. The buckle disappeared with a little hiss and that gave me a good idea of what would happen to me if I happened to drop in. So I moved carefully until I found the edge of the vat with my feet. Then I circled on the rim until I found a board in the wall that could be worked loose. After that, it was easy. I made a space big enough for me—and closed it up behind me when I left.”

  “And the Joker thought you’d been dissolved in the carbolic acid vat,” Bruce Wayne said quietly.

  Dick shivered. “I hate to think of how nearly right he was.”

  “Pardon me, sir,” Alfred said. “I don’t like to interfere, but there is something I think you should hear.”

  Alfred turned on the radio. In a moment the voice of Vance Jennings, disc jockey of the Tune Parade program, came on:

  “And here is your top request number for today, folks. The tune most of you have asked to hear is—‘Stormy Weather.’”

  As the first strains of the melody came over the radio, Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson began to laugh.

  Alfred permitted himself a slight frosty chuckle. “Rather fitting, don’t you think, sir? It would be quite accurate to predict ‘Stormy Weather’ for the Joker from now on!”

  John Whiting turned off the radio with an angry snap of the dial. He turned to the other men gathered in the room.

  “That’s the message the Joker said would mean Batman was dead,” John Whiting said.

  Everyone was looking at him.

  He picked up a newspaper from the table and flung it down. “But we know better! The newspapers tell the real story. The Joker and all his men have been captured. Batman and Robin are very much alive!”

  As though John Whiting’s words had touched a switch, everyone transferred his gaze to the crumpled newspaper with its staring black headline: “JOKER CAPTURED!”

  The effect was all that Batman and Robin could have wished for if they had been present at this meeting of the underworld’s Committee of Ten. The reaction could hardly have been improved upon. “Stunned” was an inadequate word to describe their mental state; “despair” might have been nearer to it.

  John Whiting summoned their attention by slamming his fist down on the tabletop. The diamond ring on his hand glittered.

  He thundered, “We’re all going to face the facts, whether we like it or not. All three of our candidates for the Tommy Award have been captured and are in prison. Therefore, I see no point in conducting this meeting any longer. Does anyone disagree?”

  There was no sign of disagreement.

  “Very well,” John Whiting said, “the motion is carried unanimously. There will be no Tommy Award. This meeting is adjourned and—”

  A black object sprang to the table near the place where John Whiting’s hand rested.

  The black object snarled, hunched its back, spat.

  “A cat!” shouted someone near the table.

  “A black cat!”

  John Whiting stared at the hunched, snarling cat on the table—its eyes gleaming with emerald hate.

  “A black cat,” he said. “That’s the symbol of…”

  The sentence was finished by the tall, striking figure who appeared in the doorway.

  “…the Catwoman!” she said.

  CHAPTER 9

  Suddenly there was an exclamation of fear from Shotgun Simmons, one of the Committee of Ten.

  “She’s supposed to be in prison. Maybe she made a deal with the cops! Maybe she’s double-crossing us!”

  The Catwoman’s eyes were cold as green ice: “Is someone in this room accusing me? Let him come forward.”

  There was no movement from the men in the room. Shotgun Simmons moved slightly back into the crowd.

  The Catwoman’s voice was a hiss: “My claws can deal out the same punishment to any of you that I gave to the guard at the prison wall. The poor fellow tried to stop me. One quick rake of these…” the Catwoman’s claws unsheathed and made a savage downthrust, “…and he regretted his mistake.”

  John Whiting said, “So you escaped, Catwoman. I congratulate you. But I’m afraid that you’ve arrived too late to compete for the Tommy Award.”

  The Catwoman’s hand gestured to her cat Hecate. In a single bound, the slinky black animal leaped to her shoulder and crouched there, regarding the men in the room with beady-eyed malevolence.

  “Too late?” the Catwoman asked.

  “I’m sorry, Catwoman,” John Whiting said. “Since our erstwhile colleagues—the Joker and the Penguin—have both come to grief, we of the committee have called off the contest. Any further attempts to defeat Batman and Robin may very well end in failure, if not total disaster. There’s no use looking for trouble.”

  “I quite agree.” The Catwoman stroked the fur of Hecate, perched on her shoulder. “Therefore, I hope all of you will be wise enough not to look for trouble—with me!”

  John Whiting answered firmly, “We have agreed by unanimous vote not to make the Tommy Award to anyone this year.”

  “Without giving me a chance?” Catwoman inquired in her silkiest tone.

  “If the Penguin failed,” Oliver Therry, the British representative on the committee said, “and the Joker as well, I fail to see why you should fare differently, Catwoman.”

  “I’ll give you at least one reason,” the Catwoman answered. “The Penguin and the Joker are fools—and I am not. I know how to deal with Batman. My feminine intuition is sharper than his masculine intelligence.”

  “You will have to persuade me,” Oliver Therry said, “that you are cleverer than the Penguin.”

  “I shall,” the Catwoman sneered.

  “I’m afraid not, Catwoman,” John Whiting said. “We all feel lucky to have escaped thus far ourselves. As it is, we had a mighty close call on the yacht. And I, for one, lost my respectable front when my pipe-organ manufacturing plant was uncovered. Others among us have lost dear comrades who were captured while fighting beside the Joker and the Penguin. We don’t intend to risk any more such losses. We’re smart enough to know when to quit.”

  “If the Penguin had known that, he might be here today,”

  Oliver Therry said. “What makes you so sure you can do better than he?”

  The Catwoman’s tone was scathing. “His bird-crimes are juvenile escapades. His umbrellas are highly unreliable, often spur-of-the-moment devices. My cat-crimes are boldly conceived and thoroughly engineered. Nothing is left to chance.”

  François, the French leader, replied, “Ze Joker is ver’—what you call?—thorough also. But hees attempt to defeat ze Batman also has fail’.”

  “The Joker is a mad egotist,” retorted Catwoman. “I will riddle Batman no riddles. But I do have a scheme to prove once and for all that I am the world’s greatest artist in crime.”

  J
ohn Whiting said dubiously, “I wish I could go along with you, Catwoman. I really do. But this meeting has been officially adjourned. And no award will be—”

  The Catwoman drew a short, strange-looking whip from her belt and in a slashing motion lashed out. The whip struck Whiting right across the cheek.

  He screamed with pain and grabbed his face.

  “Ah, you don’t like the taste of my cat-o’-nine-tails. You’ll get worse than that, John Whiting, if you try to dictate to me.”

  Oliver Therry said, “My dear Catwoman, you must be sensible and—EEEOW!”

  The cat-o’-nine-tails had struck again. Welts appeared on Oliver Therry’s face and neck. He cowered back.

  François snarled. He drew a stiletto from his shoulder sheath. But before he could raise it, the black cat Hecate leaped from Catwoman’s shoulder, hissing and screeching. The cat’s claws raked François’s eyes as he staggered back, yelling.

  “Sacre Dieu! Take eet away!”

  The stiletto clattered to the floor, then Hecate leapt down from François and with an insolent swagger went back to the Catwoman.

  She glanced about her imperiously.

  “Are there others who would care to challenge me?”

  Seven craven heads shook in seven craven denials.

  “Very well, then,” said the Catwoman. “It is the judgment of the Committee of Ten that I will get my chance to defeat Batman and Robin?”

  Seven heads nodded in agreement.

  Catwoman looked to where John Whiting, Oliver Therry, and François were sullenly nursing their wounds.

  “I prefer unanimity,” the Catwoman said. “I hate dissenters. How do you three gentlemen feel about it?”

  John Whiting said, “There should be a vote of the committee.”

  “The voting will take place now.” The Catwoman’s cat-o’nine-tails cracked sharply against the floor. “I want the vote to be unanimous, gentlemen.”

  Oliver Therry said, “This isn’t the democratic way. It’s coercion. It’s blackmail!”