Batcave Gadgets

If you ever got to visit the Batcave — and you almost certainly will not, because it is one of the best-kept secrets on Earth — you would see all of the things you would expect to see. The Batmobile, low and sleek, parked on its platform. The giant computer with its glowing maps of Gotham City. The long row of glass cases holding all the different Batsuits Bruce had built over the years. The trophy gallery, with its giant playing card from the Joker and its silver coin from Two-Face and its great green question mark from the Riddler.

But if you turned to the left, just past the giant computer, you would see something a little different. Smaller. Brighter. Tidier.

A workbench.

That was Robin's corner.

The workbench was Dick Grayson's own. Bruce had given it to him on Dick's eleventh birthday and said, very seriously, "This is yours. What you build on this bench is yours. Take care of your tools, and your tools will take care of you." Then he had given Dick a little wooden box of woodworking tools with brass knobs. Alfred had given him a yellow apron with the letter R embroidered on the front pocket. Dick had cried just a little, when nobody was looking.

On the workbench, by Dick's twelfth year as Robin, there were three things he had built with his own two hands.

The first was a tray of Bird-arangs.

Bird-arangs were Robin's own invention. Batman's Batarangs were big and heavy, the kind of thing you needed strong adult shoulders to throw across a warehouse. Robin had thought about that, and he had thought about his own size, and he had thought about the trapeze, where everything had to be light and quick. So he had designed something new. The Bird-arang was smaller than the Batarang. It was lighter. It was shaped like a little bird in flight, with two pointed wings and a curved beak. It was painted bright yellow on top and bright red on the bottom. Robin could throw one with each hand at the same time, left-right, left-right, with the easy rhythm of a circus juggler. He could bank them off walls. He could bank them off ceilings. He could bank them off a swinging warehouse meat hook, around the back of a goon, and onto the back of the goon's helmet with a soft clonk, and the goon would go down with a confused little "oof" and never figure out what had hit him.

The second thing on the workbench was a coil of jumping line.

The jumping line was Dick's own spliced rope — strong enough to swing an adult, light enough to coil in a pouch the size of a tennis ball. He had braided it himself. Bruce had taught him a sailor's splice, and Dick had practiced it for weeks until his fingers knew the pattern in their sleep. The jumping line was paired with a small grappling-hook wrist-launcher that Robin wore strapped to the underside of his right gauntlet. Fwoosh — the hook would shoot up. Snick — the hook would lock onto a fire escape or a gargoyle. Whirrrr — the line would pull Robin up after it.

The third thing was the R-belt itself.

The R-belt was Dick's bright yellow utility belt, with a great big black letter R for a buckle in the center. Alfred had stitched the belt out of strong yellow leather. But every single pouch on it had been designed by Dick himself, based on a year of trying things out and figuring out what a small acrobatic crime-fighter actually needed.

There were eight pouches in total.

The first pouch held the grappling-hook wrist-launcher and its little spare cartridges.

The second pouch held smoke pellets — pink, blue, green, gray — small as marbles, but powerful enough to fill a whole bank lobby with mist in three seconds.

The third pouch held a coiled length of thin climbing rope, with a little carabiner on each end.

The fourth pouch held a magnifying glass for examining clues, plus a little flashlight no bigger than a finger.

The fifth pouch held lockpicks — a set of seven slender tools that could open almost any lock in Gotham — wrapped in a strip of soft leather.

The sixth pouch held yellow emergency flares, in case Robin ever needed to mark a spot on a roof or in a tunnel.

The seventh pouch held a roll of strong silver tape. Alfred called it "the universal tool, sir." Robin had patched many things with it, including, once, Batman's torn cape, in the middle of a fight, with the Joker watching.

And the eighth pouch — the secret one, sealed with two waterproof folds on the inside of the belt where rain and river water could not get in — held a single small folded photograph. Mary and John Grayson, in their bright Flying Graysons costumes, smiling at the camera, the big top of Haly's Circus behind them.

Dick carried that photograph everywhere. He had not forgotten them. He never would.

But.

Here is the thing that Bruce understood about Robin, that all the bad guys of Gotham took a long, painful time to figure out.

The gadgets were not what made Robin dangerous.

Robin's greatest gadget was, simply, himself.

He had grown up on a trapeze. He had spent eight years of his life — the years when most children are learning to ride a bicycle — learning instead how to fly. He had a sense of his own weight in midair that almost no other human being on Earth possessed. He could leap from a standing start across a gap as wide as a swimming pool. He could catch a ledge with two fingers and pull himself up. He could somersault around a spinning ceiling fan without his hair so much as touching the blade.

Bruce watched him practice once, from the high catwalk over the cave. Dick was running a course Bruce had built — a maze of swinging weights, spinning beams, and shifting platforms over a soft net. Dick moved through the maze the way a leaf moves down a stream. There was no fight in him. Just flow.

Bruce said, very quietly, mostly to himself, "He doesn't fight gravity. He has a conversation with it."

Alfred, who was passing through the cave at that moment with a tray of tea, paused and made a small mental note. Later that night, in the kitchen, Alfred wrote the line down on an index card in his very neat handwriting and pinned it to the front of the manor refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a teapot.

It stayed there for years. Visitors who came to Wayne Manor would sometimes notice it and ask Alfred who it was about. Alfred would smile and say, "A young friend of the family, madam." And he would offer them another scone.

The first time Robin put every single one of his gadgets together — Bird-arangs, R-belt, jumping line, and his own trapeze-trained body — was the night of the Sprang Bridge hostage rescue.

Sprang Bridge was the great suspension bridge across the Gotham River. A gang had stopped a school bus full of children halfway across it and chained the bus to the railing. The Bat-Signal had gone up. Batman and Robin had come.

Batman went up to the cables. Robin took the lower road.

Dick fired his grappling hook upward — FWOOSH. The hook caught the underside of a beam high above the bus. He swung. He swung across a hundred-foot gap of open air, with the dark river churning far below. At the top of the swing, he let go. He twisted in midair — one tuck, two tucks, perfect form — and as he flipped he reached into his right pouch and his left pouch at the same time. Two Bird-arangs flew sideways. One disarmed the henchman with the gun on the left side of the bus. The other disarmed the henchman with the gun on the right side of the bus. Both henchmen blinked, looked at their empty hands, and looked up just in time to see something bright land in front of them.

Robin landed in front of the bus driver in a perfect three-point crouch. Smoke pellet went down. Pink smoke filled the air. The two henchmen got tangled up trying to find each other inside the smoke and fell over their own feet.

When the smoke cleared, the bus driver — a kind older man named Mr. Habib, who would tell this story to his grandchildren for the rest of his life — saw a bright bird-colored boy in a yellow cape, standing right next to his driver's-side window.

"Holy cliffhanger, Batman," Robin said cheerfully, "we got him."

Mr. Habib, who had been driving Gotham school buses for nineteen years and had been in two earlier hostage situations and had thought he was going to have to be in a third one tonight, did something he had not done since high school.

He applauded. Right there in the driver's seat. He clapped his hands.

Up on the suspension cable, high above, Batman watched. He did not move. He did not smile. But after a moment, he gave a single small nod, deep inside his cowl, that nobody else saw.

It was enough.

The Boy Wonder was a one-bird circus. The Bird-arangs spun. The R-belt held everything a small bright crime-fighter could possibly need. The grappling line whirred. And Robin, who had grown up flying through the air under a striped big top, had simply traded one big top for another.

Gotham City. The new big top.

And Robin, the brightest, bravest, most acrobatic boy on the high wire.