CHAPTER 4
NAZI TREACHERY
The experiment was pronounced a total success.
That evening, the lab staff joined Rogers, General Anderson and Dr. Erskine in a celebration.
“We know we can do it now,” Dr. Erskine announced. “Operation Rebirth is a complete success. One by one, we shall transform our nation’s fighting men into the proudest examples of humanity the world has ever known. That should stop Hitler and his talk of an Aryan Master Race!”
There were cheers and, when he could be heard, General Anderson asked, “Will you be setting your formulas down on paper now, Doctor?
“No, I still think they will remain safer in my head. However, I shall supervise the mass production of the necessary chemicals, which can be administered without my help. We’ll be closing down all our operations here except for the lab, which we will be expanding to cover all floors. I expect that within a month we will be turning out enough chemicals to treat twenty men a day.”
One man seemed less pleased than the others at this news. It was the little man who had been Steve’s gym trainer. “What about me, Doc? What’ll I do?”
“I’m afraid our need for you is ended, Max,” Dr. Erskine said. “But you’re a good trainer. I’m sure you can find as much work as you ever did.”
The little pug-eared man’s lips curled. “Like that, eh? Pick ’em up, throw ’em down. Well, I got other plans!” With that, he whipped out a short-barreled revolver.
“Okay, Doc, you’re coming with me. We got business together—elsewhere.”
Max moved up behind Erskine, and began urging him toward the door. As Steve watched in astonishment, he felt his stomach tighten.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Dr. Erskine was protesting.
“I know what I’m doing. Heil Hitler!” Max shouted.
Suddenly the old doctor whirled, turning on Max and grappling with him. “No,” he shouted. “For Hitler, never!”
There were four shots, muffled by the doctor’s body, but loud in the small room.
“If I can’t take you, nobody gets you,” Max screamed. And Erskine’s dead body slumped to the floor.
For the swift duration of the scene, Steve Rogers had forgotten who and what he now was.
But Dr. Erskine’s violent death galvanized him. He lunged at the little man near the door.
“No, no! Keep back! I’ll shoot!” Max cried. Then he triggered his two remaining shots directly at Rogers.
Steve felt the impact of both bullets, but, reaching the Nazi assassin, he lifted him high over his head, whirled him about, and then threw him to the floor, where the man collapsed, unconscious.
He was about to pick the unconscious man up and batter him against the wall, when his rage began to ebb, and he began thinking rationally again. Slowly he shook his head. “Well,” he said. “I stopped him. But too late to do any good.”
“Who would’ve thought it?” General Anderson was saying. “Max, of all people—a Nazi spy.”
“He must’ve been waiting to get his hands on either the chemical or the formula,” one of the lab technicians said.
“When he realized this would be his last chance, he had no choice.”
“And now—Dr. Erskine is dead,” Anderson said. “Dead. And so is our program. With that man has perished the secret of a whole new biochemical science.” He glanced over at Rogers, now standing uncertainly near the door. “My God, man! You’ve been wounded!”
Rogers shook his head. “Flesh wounds, sir. The bullets went right through my thigh without doing any real damage. I’ve stopped the bleeding, and nipped any infection. I’ll be fully healed in a couple of days.”
General Anderson stared at him. “You—you’re not joking, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“You can really do all those fantastic things Dr. Erskine was hoping for?”
“Well, sir, I haven’t tried everything yet.”
“But enough. We know enough! This is something.
Maybe we can salvage more from this program than I thought!”
Thus was Captain America born.
General Anderson explained it to him when he brought Steve Rogers his new uniform.
“You’re the only one we’ve got—the only man successfully taken through the entire Operation Rebirth program. You were intended to be only the first of many. Now you’re it. You’re the one man we have, and we need to utilize you as effectively as we can.
“We’re giving you an alter ego, a symbolic identity. When you don this uniform, your face will be masked, and you’ll no longer be a private citizen. You’ll be America herself. You’ll be Captain America. You’ll give our country a rallying point, you’ll be a youthful, dynamic Uncle Sam. And you’ll give old Adolf something to think about.”
“I don’t get it, sir. Why can’t I just be Steve Rogers, an American? Why the gaudy costume, the mask?”
“I told you why, Steve. We want you to be a symbol that every man can identify with. We want men all over this country to feel that beneath that mask it could be them, it could be any American.
“But there’s another reason. You’re going to be in a dangerous position. You represent a new kind of man, and we’re not going to let it be known that Dr. Erskine died. If the Nazis are keeping track of Operation Rebirth, we want them to think it has been fully successful. Perhaps they’ll think that Captain America is not one, but many men. But in any case, you’re going to be a target—a walking, living breathing target, for every Nazi spy and saboteur in the country. That is, you will be as Captain America. As Steve Rogers, you’ll be unknown, and you’ll have some breathing space. If necessary, we can curtail your appearances as Captain America, and all those Nazis will be running around in circles, wondering just who and where you are.”
Steve nodded. “I guess I better try this thing on.”
In the weeks that followed, Captain America, garbed in his memorable red, white and blue uniform, armed with a high-alloy titanium-steel shield, blazed into action all over the East Coast of the United States.
When saboteurs attacked a munitions dump, Captain America materialized out of the night, his shield deflecting their bullets, to overwhelm and frighten them away.
When the Nazi Bund held a secret meeting to hand down high-level sabotage orders from overseas, Captain America appeared in their midst, totally disrupting the meeting, and seizing their ringleaders.
When the infamous Red Skull, Hitler’s much-feared personal agent of terror, appeared in the United States, it was Captain America who confronted him, opposing his paranoic ruthlessness with his own courage and strength. It would not be their last confrontation,* but it set the tone for the outcome of those which followed, as Captain America scored triumph after triumph over his macabre Nazi nemesis.
Each appearance reinforced the newly growing legend. At first newspapers were skeptical, and editorials asked dubiously, “Who is this masked and colored figure who appears to be straight from the pages of mythology?” But then photographs, often blurred and underexposed, began to appear, and finally a newsreel photographer caught the first live footage of Captain America in action, as he dashed repeatedly into a blazing factory to rescue unconscious workers. That film appeared in theaters throughout America, and brought home for the first time to Mr. and Mrs. America the reality of this fantastic man.
Then came Pearl Harbor, and war.
Steve Rogers became Pvt. Steve Rogers, as Captain America followed the war overseas.
And he acquired a sidekick, teenaged Bucky Barnes, an orphan like himself, who had managed to become adopted by Rogers’ company while still in training, stateside. Barnes was a tough youth, a boy who had grown up in the same Lower East Side slums where Rogers had gained his new identity. Fast-witted and clever, the boy was quick at adapting himself to conditions as he found them. When the war began, he decided to join the army, although his actual age was all too apparent. But Bucky wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, and soon he was living on base.
The two formed a strange friendship for, while Bucky admired Steve Rogers’ superb physique, he was also envious, and forever trying to outdo the bigger man. It was in the process of attempting a practical joke on Steve that Bucky found his Captain America uniform in his footlocker. The footlocker had been locked at the time, but locks had never stood in Bucky’s way.
“I got somethin’ on ya, Cap,” he said, when he was able to draw Rogers off alone. “I found ya monkey suit.”
It was blackmail, of course, and initially Rogers resented it. But he had a second costume made and, in their free time, he began training Bucky to work as his partner.
Fortunately, the boy was agile and a fast learner. They practiced acrobatic tricks, and coded maneuvers. The boy was small and fast. It helped.
But not enough.
It was late in the war, in early 1945, and the two were stationed at an experimental army base, where captured V-II “buzzbombs”—small, droning German rocket-planes filled with high explosives—were being examined. Dressed in army fatigues, they were strolling by the empty field where the buzzbombs were lined up on their carts.
“Boy, wouldja look at those babies,” Bucky said. “Murderous, huh, Cap?”
“But surprisingly ineffectual,” Rogers replied. “They’re a last-ditch attempt of Hitler’s to terrorize the British.”
Frost had settled over the ground, and a low moon gleamed dully on the dark-colored rocket planes. Bucky blew on his hands and rubbed them together. “Ol’ Adolf is really stickin’ his neck out, huh?”
Rogers nodded. Then, suddenly, he raised his arm and stopped Bucky short. “I saw something move over there—in the shadows under one of the planes.”
“Hey! You mean someone’s messin’ around with ’em?” Bucky whispered. “They’re all duds, aren’t they?”
“No, they’re not. They’re intact, and deadly. The wrong move, and they could blow this whole base sky high!”
“Holy cow, Cap. We gotta do somethin’!”
“Right!”
Quickly, silently, they separated, and began moving in on the grouped rocket planes from opposite sides.
Rogers was ducking under a low tail section when, suddenly, he heard Bucky’s shout. “Here he is, Cap! I got 'im!”
Then, in the next instant, the whole world seemed to be aflame, as the bright searing torch of a rocket exhaust leapt from one of the planes.
It was starting to move!
Quickly Rogers ran for it, and jumped up onto the stubby wing. He had to stop it! This was a fully armed bomb, and if it struck anything, it would go off!
“Cap!” Bucky shouted. Rogers shot a startled look at his partner on the opposite wing.
“Jump!” he shouted back. “Jump off! I’ll take care of it!”
But now the rocket plane was rolling down the deserted tarmac at express-train speed, and to jump would be fatal.
“Hold on,” he shouted. “We’ll see if we can steer this thing!”
The nose had lifted now, the weight of the two men shifting the balance of the plane back on its wheeled cart. Suddenly, they were airborne.
The plane had control surfaces, but no way to reach them. It was all Steve Rogers could do to hold on against the buffeting airstream.
But there was hope. Up ahead, moonlight glinted off the choppy waves of the North Atlantic. If they could drop the plane’s nose low enough, they could drop off into the water, and the plane itself would blow up harmlessly at sea.
Rogers shouted his instructions to Bucky over the high-pitched whine of the rocket engine, and the roar of the airstream.
Painfully, inch by inch, they crawled forward on the rocket’s short fuselage, until once again they had changed its balance and sent it into a slow dive toward the water.
Then, before Rogers could act, Bucky screamed. “I’m slipping!”
The boy didn’t have Steve Rogers’ prodigious physical stamina. His fingers, numbed by the intense cold, had lost their grip. Frantically, Steve tried to reach back for him, but too late. Bucky’s body caught at his waist in the tail assembly, hooked between the fuselage and the rocket engine atop the thick rudder.
Steve tried to move back to him, to grab him, free him.
But then the icy surface of the Atlantic was speeding up toward them, and he knew it was too late. Desperately, he kicked loose, flinging himself away from the diving rocket. Instinctively, he curled himself into a tight ball, scant seconds before he hit the water.
It smashed at him, felt like falling four stories to a hard concrete sidewalk, and yet it didn’t destroy him, but cushioned the blow. He sank down, down, far beneath the surface, consciousness all but gone.
From a great distance, a second blow struck him, and a thick red haze came through his closed eyes. Then he was unconscious.
The next chapter in Steve Rogers’ life is the most fantastic, and yet, paradoxically, the one he can remember least about.
Because for the next twenty years, Steve Rogers was in a state of suspended animation.
Scientists are only now groping their way toward an understanding of suspended animation. They know that some animals—certain lizards, for instance—simply cease functioning when the temperature drops below a certain point, and yet revive, healthy, the following spring. Lizards are “cold blooded,” and their internal temperatures are the same as the temperature of their surroundings. But even warm-blooded mammals can slow their metabolisms and hibernate for long cold winters, surviving on far less food than customarily.
The goal that scientists have been seeking is that of “quick freezing” a live human being into a state in which his life is suspended. He is not dead, but neither is he alive. His body processes will continue, but at a vastly reduced rate. His heart might pump once a month—or once a year. If he is kept in cold and sterile surroundings, a person thus “quick frozen” might theoretically survive for centuries, his tissues in perfect preservation, awaiting only revival to be alive and healthy once more.
Steve Rogers was no longer an average human being. His body was capable of feats no other human being could duplicate. And he had a strong will to survive.
He was submerged in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland. He had no air, and the water was rapidly sapping the heat from his body.
His subconscious took over. It slowed his metabolism to the barest crawl, reducing his need for oxygen to that which was already within his lungs, and allowing him to become the first human being ever frozen into a state of suspended animation.
He was caught, frozen, in an ice floe, until at last, by several strange quirks of fate, he was freed, and found by a group of superheroes who called themselves The Avengers.**
No other man could have survived so fantastic a voyage through time. And no other man could feel so displaced by time.
He was a man twenty years in his own future. By rights he should be nearly fifty years old—nearly twice the age of his fellow Avengers. Yet his mind and his body were not yet thirty. The world had changed; not he.
When the Avengers had brought him back to New York with them and insisted that, as an honored hero of the past, he join them, he felt a sort of melancholy homesickness for his own time and world. Bucky—dead now—a bratty kid sometimes, too given to ignoring commands and making his own decisions, but plucky, full of courage and resourcefulness. He would miss Bucky like a younger brother. And what of his older brother, Alan, with whom he had lost touch so many years ago, while he was still in school? Aunt and uncle dead; he’d checked. And General Anderson, killed in action in the Pacific. No one was left; no one whom he’d known in the old days; no one who’d shared his secret.
Steve Rogers? Steve Rogers was officially dead now; had been declared missing and presumed killed in action, along with Bucky Barnes. Those who had known he was Captain America were not available to make the correlation, or to tell a troubled world what had happened to that fighting symbol of freedom.
It was a big war, a war for which new words had to be invented, like “snafu”—“situation normal, all fouled up”—and “fubar”—“fouled up beyond all repair”. It was a war of catastrophic mistakes as well as smashing victories. It was a war which had mobilized the armies of half the globe, and in which logistics—the science of moving necessary supplies—played an important role. Sometimes the bookkeeping wasn’t what it should have been; forms were misfiled, and at least one entire platoon was misplaced and misrouted by a flunky in the Pentagon.
Captain America had disappeared, and Steve Rogers was presumed dead.
For twenty years.
* But that’s another story, and one we told in Tales of Suspense #s 65, 66, 67, 68; May, June, July, August, 1965.—Stan Lee, encyclopedic editor.
** For the full story, you’ll have to lay your hands on The Avengers #4, March, 1964.—Smilin’ Stan Lee.
Tomorrow:
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