With The Avengers
Time had not stood still while Steve Rogers slept his dreamless sleep. One war ended, and other, smaller ones began. The cause of freedom was not settled, and the lines that separated right from wrong were forever blurred on that day the Atomic Bomb took its first lives in Hiroshima.
The hemline went up, then down, and then began a climb which was not to stop even at the knee. Dresses ballooned, then tightened into slender sheaths. Women’s hair became boyishly short, then bouffantly teased, and then returned to the shoulder-length “natural” look, while men’s hair descended for the first time in a century. Cars got bigger and then smaller, while air travel shortened the distance between New York and London to six hours, and threatened to reduce it even more dramatically within the next decade. Big boxes that received radio programs grew into tiny miniatures, while little television screens swelled in size and exploded into color. Records increased their diameter from ten inches to twelve inches, and their playing time from six minutes to thirty-six.
For those who have lived through this era of fantastic growth and change—the “post war” era—it all seems quite dull and inevitable. Even space travel seems commonplace today, and the launchings rarely excite news as they did only a year or two ago.
But for Steve Rogers, this new, affluent, exciting America was a more foreign land than any he’d ever known He had hardly been prepared for the sight of the strangely costumed people who greeted him upon his awakening, but they were only a foretaste of what was to come.
These people, the Avengers, were a strange lot, by any era’s standards.
Take Iron Man, for instance. He was not truly a man of iron, but a man who wore a suit of flexible steel armor, full of transistorized microcircuits, powered by a miniature power-pack. His armor was an exoskeleton which not only provided protection from attack, but quadrupled his strength as well.
Then there was Giant Man, and his partner, the Wasp. He was a biochemist who had stumbled onto a chemical which would allow its user to compact his molecules and reduce his size—or, in reversing the process, expand to giant-size. He was not to have an easy time of his size-control, however, and he and the Wasp, who was his fiancée, had retired from the Avengers soon after.
The final member was by far the most impressive: Thor, God of Thunder. Rogers had found him least easy to understand or accept. Even after Thor had told him that the gods of legend were indeed superhumans who had once walked the face of the earth, and that he had returned when a mortal had found his hammer and enchanted him into his earthly personification, Steve remained torn between awe and skepticism and was relieved when Thor, too, became less active an Avenger.
But these Avengers had saved him, and accepted him into their midst, and for this he was grateful. For them he was himself a modern-day legend, and in a way he was indirectly responsible for them.
Captain America had been the first of the costumed crime-fighters now so familiarly known as “superheroes.” At the time, his uniform had been developed for patriotic and symbolic reasons, and for practical reasons as well. It was simple and effective, since the snug-fitting knitted cloth did not hamper freedom of movement, or offer folds to snag against rough edges, while the boots and gauntlets were tough enough to take the heavy wear demanded of them.
But Captain America’s appearance had set off a chain reaction and, in his wake, other men appeared, some to fight by the side of law and order, others to prey as criminals upon the unwary, each wearing a useful, functional costume, but using the costume chiefly for its psychological effect. When a man donned a mask and costume, he became a more fearful figure, for all his new anonymity.
There was a power in the unknown. People feared that which they could not understand.
The science of the fifties, like the fallout of the forties, helped develop more of these costumed superheroes. Some found their roles accidentally, others by design. Drawing upon the space-age technology of printed circuits and micro-miniaturization, such men as Iron Man were able to carve out whole new roles for themselves in the ever-increasing fight against crime within the nation, and foreign threats from without.
It was all enough to make Rogers feel way behind his time.
The Avengers had fished him out of a gulf stream in which his block of ice had melted, and aboard their ship. When they sailed into New York, it was a harbor and a city he had never seen before.
As they approached land, Rogers, his army fatigues long since in tatters and gone, wearing only his Captain America costume, and a heavy topcoat over it, marveled at the sights. Before them was a great bridge that stretched across the harbor, linking Staten Island with the southern tip of Brooklyn. It had yet to open, but its span was complete. It looked longer than the Golden Gate Bridge—and was.
An expressway paralleled their route along the Brooklyn shore and Steve stared, entranced, at the sleekly futuristic cars that sped along it.
Lower Manhattan, as they approached it, looked different too. The skyline was taller, and there were many buildings which looked like long slim boxes upended.
They moved slowly up the East River, passing under the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, passing close by the United Nations Building. In quiet tones, Iron Man explained the U.N., and its function since the end of World War II.
Then they had disembarked at a special pier, and were in a taxi, heading crosstown for a quiet town house on the Upper East Side.
Giant Man, now normal-sized, explained it to Steve: “You see, Cap, the house is owned by Tony Stark. He’s a wealthy inventor who’s been responsible for a lot of our top defense work. Iron Man works for him, and talked him into donating the place to us as a headquarters. It gives us a good central meeting place, and it’s just the place to put you up. Nobody else is living there now, except for Jarvis, the man who takes care of things. Unobtrusive; you’ll find him easy to get along with. He likes to pretend he’s a British-type butler. Don’t ever let him know I told you he’s from Flatbush.”
And all too quickly, Steve found himself ensconced within the Stark mansion, a permanent resident.
It was no lark, being an Avenger. If the going had been rough before, it was no easier now. He had stepped into a world infinitely more complicated, a world in which science and technology played an increasingly important role. Free moments Rogers spent in the main branch of the Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, just trying to bone up.
Then, while Steve was in the midst of an important case, Thor disappeared, saying only that he must attend a "Trial of the Gods", and Giant Man, Wasp, and Iron Man began to look longingly back on the days when their problems were only those of other ordinary people. They began auditions for new Avengers to replace them.* As the Wasp put it, “Why don’t all of us take a leave of absence? Everybody deserves a vacation sometime. I—I’d like to lead a normal life for a while; just like anybody else!”
When Rogers returned from his mission, he found himself the leader of a new outfit. Gone were Thor, Giant Man, Wasp, and Iron Man—the few friends he’d made in this new life. Instead he had under his command Hawkeye, an archer whose unusual arrows had the uncanny way of always hitting their mark, and a pair of young mutants, a brother and a sister, Pietro and Wanda, better known as Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Their names were appropriate since, as Quicksilver, Pietro could move at speeds which made him only a blur, while Wanda’s scarlet witchery consisted of a strange hex power which manipulated the laws of chance in favor of those she sided with, and against their enemies.
The Avengers were often faced with challenging assignments in the months that followed, and those assignments shaped and tested them, building the confidence of each in his fellow teammates, and developing their maturity as Avengers.
But they didn’t spend all their time together. That would be impossible. Just now Wanda and Pietro were in their home country for a visit, while Hawkeye was pursuing a solo mission.
And Steve Rogers, Captain America, faced his newest problem alone.
Five minutes after midnight, a patrol car drove down Liberty Street. As it passed the entrance to Liberty Place, the policeman at the wheel gestured at the dark bulk of the Continental parked half on the sidewalk, and slowed his car.
“It’s been there since early evening,” he said. “Ticket it?”
“Might as well.”
The car stopped, reversed, and drew up at the neck of the narrow street. The patrolman in the passenger seat climbed wearily out, and walked without haste to the Continental.
As the man behind the wheel watched, the patrolman used a small pencil-flash on the car’s license plate, paused, then flashed it again. Then he pulled something else from his pocket and used the flash again. With a clearly visible shrug, he stuffed everything back in his pockets, and returned to the car.
“You didn’t ticket it?”
“Nahh. One of those licenses.”
“Oh. Oh, well.” The driver put the car in gear, and it rolled quietly away.
Twenty-five minutes after midnight, a heavy van rumbled down Liberty Street, and made a clumsy left turn into Liberty Place. It stopped halfway up the block, then backed around until it was blocking the street, its rear almost against a dingy warehouse door.
Had anyone familiar with the street and its few, failing businesses seen this, he would have been perplexed. That warehouse door had not been used in years. The first-floor windows of the building had been bricked up years ago. The stationery store next door had expanded into the building.
But the door rolled up soundlessly and, behind it, lit by dim yellow bulbs, was a cubicle, measuring eight feet across, and eight feet deep. Its walls were wood, fresh-looking, but already work-scarred.
Five men stood in the small room, although there were no other doors visible. One of the five was tall, thin, expensively dressed, and quite bald.
The other four were dressed in dirty coveralls and, now that the door was up, they moved quickly to open the back doors of the van, which opened into the room and cut off the last opportunity of visibility for anyone on the street. There was no one out on the street, of course. No one lived in these buildings.
A cart stood in the center of the small room. While the bald man stood in one corner, watching, the other men began unloading the cart, three of them passing its contents up to the truck bed, while the fourth, leaping up into the truck, positioned each load.
The cart wasn’t large and its load wasn’t large, not more than two cubic feet. The load looked basically like a load of bricks. But as each man in turn lifted a brick from the stack on the cart, muscles stood out on his arms, and his back strained.
Each man slid his brick into the wood-ridged truck bed, where the fourth man pulled it, slid it, to the front of the load-space, where the bricks were arranged side-by-side.
There were not that many bricks. Soon they were all loaded. The man in the truck released the plywood boards standing against the van sides, and they fell over the bricks. He aligned them, and finished driving in the nails. Now, to all casual eyes, the truck bed looked empty. A tarp, tossed loose into one corner, completed the illusion. The man jumped down from the truck, and one of the others helped him close and bolt the doors. He gave the closed doors a smart rap, and, in acknowledgement, the truck’s starter whined and the engine roared into life.
As the truck started way from the curb, the tall, bald man thumbed a heavy button, and the door began unwinding, sliding its jointed metal slats smoothly down into place. When the door was closed, and its motor silent, he thumbed a second button, and the room began to sink.
The five men waited in stoic silence as the open front of the elevator slid whining past old bricks, and then new concrete, until finally light began to show along its bottom edge, and it was facing an open passage.
The men in working clothes grabbed the cart and leaped off the elevator while it was still a foot from the floor of the passage, but the bald man remained stationary until it was halted. He glanced up. Overhead, invisible in the gloom of the shaft, he knew a second elevator had moved down to replace the first at ground level. It would not come lower, would only rise into the upper stories of the warehouse building. It was very unlikely that the lower shaft would ever be discovered.
The passageway ahead was an old tunnel, its air musty, and thick with dust. Half-rotten timbers provided the shoring, while a wire meandered along the roof, hanging from shiny nails, light bulbs sprouting off it at intervals like fruit on a vine.
The other men had disappeared ahead, but, instead of following them, the bald man turned into a side passage. This was narrower, wide enough only for two men abreast, and fresher-looking. He followed it into a room.
The room was of obviously recent construction. It was not large; perhaps ten-feet square. The floor was packed dirt, while the walls and ceiling were of plywood, braced by two-by-fours. There were two other doors and, through the open one, beds and another room could be seen. The air here was damp, and musty as it had been in the tunnel, but other odors also hung unmoving in the room: the smells of cooked food, human sweat, stale tobacco smoke, and other odors of men living in a confined area.
The man seated himself in a straight-backed chair before a crude desk made of packing-case wood and plywood. There was little on the desk—a few papers, an unfolded map, which he folded and set aside, and a telephone.
The telephone was a lineman’s phone; handset made of thick hard rubber, with a small dial on its back, wires leading from it ending in alligator clips.
The alligator clips had been attached to a heavy wire, and secured with friction tape. The wire ran up the wall and along the ceiling to the top of the closed door, where it disappeared around the corner.
When the thin, tall, bald man lifted the phone, a dial tone was buzzing steadily from the earpiece. He turned it over and, taking the piece that protruded from the miniature dial with careful fingers, he dialed a number.
There was a series of clicks, then the sound of a phone ringing at the other end of the line.
It rang four times, and then a voice answered. The voice was thin, colorless, and impossible to distinguish as to sex. It might have been a man; it might have been a woman.
“Yes?”
“Starling here.”
“Yes? How did it go?”
“Successfully. We got the first big load out. No difficulty.”
“I’ll be expecting to hear from Raven, then, shortly?”
“You should be. The truck shouldn’t take more’n half an hour.”
“Good. Very good.” The line went dead.
Starling set the handset down, and pushed the chair back, rising. Its legs caught in the rough dirt of the floor, and he had to reach to grab the chair and keep it from falling. He allowed his face to express momentary annoyance, and then smoothed his features blank once more.
He crossed the room to the closed door, opened it, stepped through, and closed it again. He was at the foot of a ladder. He followed it up past dim yellow light bulbs spaced almost too far apart, islands of light that didn’t quite touch, past raw earth and splintered rock, until at last he reached a landing.
He pushed a button next to the gap in the wall and, as a servo-motor began whining, the wall behind the gap swung back, and he was again in the litter-strewn cellar.
He moved up the stairs without haste, meticulously turning off the lights as he went, until he was out of the building and once more on the empty sidewalk.
The wind had grown chillier. He pulled his topcoat more snugly around him, and settled his Homburg on his bald pate. There was no traffic on the street. His footsteps made loud echoes. When he slammed his car door shut behind him, the heavy thunk bounced back and forth between the deserted buildings that lined the street.
At 1:05 a.m., the patrol car passed Liberty Place at Liberty Street. The driver glanced up the short block, and noticed it was empty. He made no comment to his companion.
* Check your files, frantic ones! It’s all in The Avengers #16, May, 1965.—Helpful Stan.
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