CHAPTER 2
WHO IS CAPTAIN AMERICA?
Steve Rogers turned the piece of metal over slowly. He had held it for some minutes now, and it already felt warm from the heat of his hand. It was a dull yellow, and it felt as heavy as lead. Embossed on the smooth side was a seal—the seal of the United States. He turned it over again.
This side was far more brilliant, but rough-textured, the marks of a hacksaw still fresh upon it.
Gold. It was a piece of gold, measuring perhaps three inches square, and less than a half-an-inch thick.
And worth well over one hundred dollars.
Rogers knew what it was, and he knew where it must have come from. But how?
He’d engaged the full cooperation of the police, and, when the dead man’s body had been searched, they’d found the chunk of gold. That was not all they’d found, of course.
The dead man’s back had been carved cleanly open by a knife so thin and razor-sharp that it had torn neither cloth nor flesh. And so hot that it had instantly cauterized the wound. A laser beam—modern science’s answer to Buck Rogers’ heat rays. It tallied with the girl’s description. A ruby-red beam of congruent light, so tightly focused that it can be used to cut through diamonds. Silent and, if properly engineered for a portable unit, quite efficient.
This was clearly not a run-of-the-mill murder.
The man had carried no identification. Rogers had wanted to do a lab job on the clothing himself, but the police had their way, and would even now be going over every particle of grime, grease and dirt imbedded in the clothes, hair, skin, even under the finger nails. Their job would be a thorough one, and they would miss nothing. An autopsy would even reveal the dead man’s last meal, if he’d bad one within the last four hours. Rogers had to admit that although he had the equipment, he had neither the training nor the time for the sort of exhaustive scientific detective job the boys downtown would be performing.
Instead, he had a more immediate job; the piece of gold.
The United States seal is stamped onto every bar of gold owned by the United States, along with a serial number. When, in the course of balance-of-payments debts, the U.S. transfers its gold to another power, it first erases its seal. It is theoretically impossible for any unauthorized person to possess a gold ingot with the U.S. seal.
Rogers knew this. For many years he had acted as an agent for the United States government. He had undergone special training by the FBI and, later, by U.S. Army Intelligence, during World War II, a time when a great deal of gold was being shipped out of Europe, and into safe-keeping in U.S. depositories. Gold is the monetary base of the world. Its movements are watched more carefully by the agents of the world powers than those of any other single commodity.
And now a strange, squat, brute-featured man had been seeking Captain America—with a piece of gold, obviously cut from a bar of United States gold.
Well, his mission, whatever it had been, had not been entirely in vain. He had found Captain America.
Rogers had already stripped off his outer clothing, and changed into his colorful Captain America uniform. As usual, when within the town-house mansion in which he now lived, he kept the cowl thrown back on his shoulders. The mask annoyed him, and there were times when he wondered why he bothered with it at all. And at other times he wondered why he even wore the uniform.
And yet he knew. It was not so much that he needed to conceal his identity these days, because for all intents and purposes he had no other identity. Steve Rogers was officially dead, and had been for almost twenty years. Captain America was his identity. It was only when he donned the tight-fitting blue uniform with its shield chest-emblem, the red snug-fitting boots, and the heavy, yet pressure-sensitive red-leather gauntlets, that he began to feel real—a complete human being.
Now he reached back and pulled up the cowl, fitting the snug hood over his head, bringing the mask down over the upper half of his face.
His expression seemed to change then. His gaze seemed to become more impelling, his visage more stern. His back straightened, and he seemed to gain additional height. No longer just another man among many, now he was Captain America!
Steve Rogers—Captain America—was a man out of his own time. Some times the memories would come—as they had earlier this day when there were no diversions and no escapes left—but they were painful memories, and not at all the memories of normal men.
Captain America was not, in any sense of the word, a normal man.
Steve Rogers was born on July 9, 1917.
His was a difficult birth and, soon after, his mother had died, leaving him to the care of his father and his seven-year-old brother.
His father was killed in the war, the next year.
Steve and his brother spent the next ten years with their aunt and uncle, who raised them as though they were their own children.
These were not easy years for Steve Rogers. His older brother, Alan, was, at eighteen, a superbly muscled youth who had excelled at sports and athletic events throughout his childhood. Ruggedly handsome, he was popular throughout high school, being twice class president.
Steve was almost as tall as Alan, but thin, gangling, a weak, nervous child who hid from failure in books, in the vicarious thrills of the adventures of other heroes in other times and lands.
Twice during his childhood, Steve suffered tuberculosis, and spent a year confined to his bed. There were no medicines then that would help; doctors could only advise complete rest. The second time, four years after the first, when he was ten, he was not expected to live.
Steve was bitterly jealous of his older brother, and yet envious and admiring. He idolized Alan, and prized the stories of Alan’s exploits he heard from all who knew him.
Yet he was forever in Alan’s shadow, always bearing well-meaning friends saying, “Now, if only you were more like your brother…”
Even Uncle Charlie had said it. Uncle Charlie was a testy man, who sometimes resented being saddled with his sister’s kids. That Steve! What he cost in doctors’ bills alone would raise a normal family.
Then came the panic of 1929—the great stock-market crash that foreshadowed the Depression. Uncle Charlie had been a heavy investor. He was wiped out, broke.
The brothers were separated then and, at the age of twelve, Steve was sent to live in a city-run orphanage.
It was a cruel time and a cruel place. He became the butt of endless jokes, jokes designed to hurt and torment him. He wore glasses now, and was perennially addressed as “Hey, four-eyes!”—sometimes even by the adults who supervised the place.
It was inevitable that he would retreat further into the world of books, away from cruel reality. But Steve Rogers had his pride. He found himself entering his studies as avidly as he had his books of fantasies. And his wide reading paid additional dividends in his larger vocabulary and more sophisticated grasp of subjects. When he graduated from high school, he was an honor student.
During the 1930s, in the midst of the worst depression this country had ever known, college enrollment climbed higher than it had ever been before.
There were no jobs. What else could young men and women do? They stayed in school, and prayed that, by graduation, things would be better.
Steve, with the aid of a state scholarship, went to Columbia, where he studied law. He had read the handwriting on the wall. With Roosevelt’s leadership, the government was moving increasingly into the control of business. While the Justice Department watched zealously for evidences of fraudulent business practices, the Treasury was extending business taxes everywhere. New laws were being passed every day regulating some aspect of business. Business was the demon, the scapegoat, blamed for the horrors of the Depression, and ever more tightly scrutinized and regulated.
Organized crime was growing too. With the death of prohibition, and the end of a lucrative trade in bootlegging organized crime had moved into other prohibited areas—gambling, narcotics, prostitution. Crime—all crime—was on the increase, as rackets men operating loan-shark operations bled jobless men white, and then drove them into petty crime for money to feed their families and repay the sharks. It was a time of desperation, and of lawlessness.
Rogers could see it very clearly. The legal profession was going to be an increasingly important and valuable career.
Then it was 1940, and Hitler’s armies were moving into Poland, France, and the other middle-European countries, and a second world war was starting.
We were not yet at war, yet we were sending millions of dollars’ worth of food and merchandise to beleaguered England, and pressure was mounting for America to declare war on Hitler.
Steve Rogers went to his local draft board and tried to enlist.
They almost laughed him out.
A doctor explained it to him, gently.
“Son, you’ve got a fine mind, and you’re heading for a degree in law. Stick with it. Don’t try for glory. We may never go to war. But if we do, we need strong, healthy men. With your medical history—forget it.”
A recruiting sergeant added, kindly, “This country needs more than fighting men. It needs brains, to keep it running. Make good with what you’ve got.”
And Steve Rogers went quietly home again. But he was not forgotten.
The American sympathizers with Hitler were forming secret bunds, and Black Shirt societies. They created acts of terror, sabotaging munitions plants and arsenals, planting mines aboard ships with relief material destined for England, and launched campaigns of anti-semitism in an attempt to divide our nation and heighten its prejudices.
And in high places, the certainty of war was obvious. Roosevelt held secret meetings with Churchill, assuring him of his support, and an old man named Albert Einstein came forward to suggest a project which was to be called The Manhattan Project, an attempt to create an atomic bomb.
Other secret projects were set up, among them, Operation Rebirth.
Operation Rebirth had several goals, but chief among them was that of rebuilding war-torn bodies into once-more healthy specimens.
The project was headed by the brilliant biochemist, Dr. Erskine. His work with the endocrine system, and chemical body control, was well beyond that of his contemporaries. Only he, of all his colleagues, had fathomed the secrets of the Swiss Dr. Hoffman’s 1938 discovery—the mind-controlling LSD-25.
Now he was ready for a human volunteer; a man with a wasted or damaged body, upon which he could test the rejuvenatory powers of his chemicals.
Steve Rogers was one of twenty men approached quietly and efficiently by the FBI for this purpose. He had proven his patriotism in his attempt to enlist in the Army. His body, thin, gangling, scrawny and weak at twenty-four, would make a perfect test case.
The two men wore wide-lapel trench coats, belted at the waist, and wide-brimmed hats. They stood at the door of Steve’s boarding-house room, waiting for him to invite them in. When he didn’t, only staring at them wordlessly, one of the men tugged at his ear lobe and then reached into his breast pocket with his other hand. He pulled out a leather folder and flipped it open. It revealed a metal shield and a photographic ID card.
“FBI,” he said. “Can we talk with you, Rogers?” He nodded inside the room.
Steve stepped back, and they followed him in. He closed and locked the door, then turned to face them. “I’m sorry, gentlemen, I can’t offer you a seat unless you want to use my bed. May I see that identification again, please? And,” he nodded at the other man, “yours? I’m afraid I didn’t get a good look.”
The first man tugged his ear again, then passed over his folder. The second man reached into his coat pocket and brought out his.
Rogers read each one carefully, compared the men with their pictures, and then quietly handed the folders back. “All right,” he said. “I’m prepared to believe that you’re Richard W. Brown and Michael McInerney, and that you work for the FBI. What do you want to talk to me about?”
Brown fingered his ear again. “You tried to enlist a few months ago.”
“That’s right. I was turned down—4F.”
“How would you like to serve your country anyhow?”
“How? By joining the Justice Department? I haven’t got my law degree yet.”
“It’s not essential. No, this would be something else entirely. I can’t tell you anything about it until after you accept except that you’ll be something of a guinea pig—and stand a chance of dying.”
“Whew! That doesn’t sound exactly rewarding. I take it there’s more to it than that? Something on the plus side?”
“Yes, it could be quite rewarding for you. If it’s successful, that is. I can’t make any guarantees at all. All I can tell you is that you’d be serving your country in a way more important than if you sacrificed your life on the battlefield—win, lose or draw.”
“What about my career? My degree?”
“For the time being that would be interrupted. However, you would receive special training, at government expense. You’ll be working for the government. That would become your career.”
Rogers stared around him at the dingy, cramped cubicle he called home. “Well, it can’t be much worse than a couple more years of this,” he said thoughtfully. “How about my books?”
“You can bring a few of them, that’s all,” McInerney said, speaking for the first time. His voice sounded deeper than Rogers had expected.
“Do I get a chance to pack?”
Brown smiled. “Take your time. We’ll be back in an hour.”
They took him in their car, a deep-maroon Hudson sedan, out across the Queensborough Bridge, east into sparsely populated Queens. After more than an hour of driving, they turned up a rutted road leading to a farmhouse.
They didn’t stop in front of the house, but continued around back of it, toward the barn. Suddenly, wide doors swung open in the side of the barn and, as the car drove past them, into the barn, Steve had a glimpse of men in army uniforms hastily pulling the doors shut.
This was a barn unlike any barn he’d ever heard of. The floor was concrete, and divided into parking spaces. The Hudson pulled in next to two Fords, painted olive-drab. Beyond, an open elevator ascended to the floor above and out of sight.
Uniformed men, carrying rifles, materialized at each side of the car. Brown and McInerney presented their credentials again, and Brown spoke in a low tone, gesturing toward the back of the car and Rogers.
The uniformed men nodded, and turned away. Brown and McInerney opened the front doors of the car and started to climb out.
Steve reached for his own door handle, and then stopped, nonplussed.
There were no inside handles on the back doors!
McInerney let him out from the outside, however, and soon he was joining them in the elevator.
The second floor was different again. Completely furnished with modern hospital fittings, smelling even of hospital smells, it seemed totally out of place, here in a barn.
But it was here, on this second floor, that Steve was to live for the next week.
The tests they gave him made his previous Army physical seem like play. They took samples of nearly every part of his body. There were blood tests, skin scrapings, even a spinal tap, for which he was, mercifully, fully unconscious. They fitted electrodes to his shaven skull, and ran elaborate electro-encephalographic tests. There was one whole day when he ate only a strange exotic-tasting purple paste—and on the next day, nothing at all, during which he was subjected to a battery of X-ray shots.
There was no use asking what it was all about. Most of the people who conducted the tests—pretty nurses and serious-faced young doctors—quite cheerfully admitted that they had no idea themselves of the purpose to which these tests would be put. They did admit, however, that Steve was not the only one undergoing them. And once he had a glimpse of a man swathed in bandages who, he was told, had been badly burned.
Then, exactly a week after he had been brought to the place, he was taken away again. Once again he climbed into the red Hudson with Brown and McInerney, but this time there was someone else sharing the back seat.
He was a handsome, graying man, wearing the uniform of a brigadier general. Brown introduced him. “Rogers, this is General Anderson. He’s in charge of the project, and he’ll tell you something of what you’re in for.”
Steve Rogers felt like a stray mongrel in his corner of the car. They were shunting him back and forth, treating him like a laboratory hamster. What had he let himself in for?
The general began to tell him.
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