CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE GREAT GOLD STEAL "Chapter 5: With The Avengers"

Chapter 5

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 new Avengers had less individual power, and it seemed strange to some onlookers that the man with the least obvious superpowers, Captain America, should be their leader. Yet his experience was far greater and, as their leader, he melded them into a functioning team—an organized team that the old Avengers had never been.

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.

Tomorrow:

Chapter 6

Into the Vault

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Captain America

The Great Gold Steal

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CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE GREAT GOLD STEAL "Chapter 4: Nazi Treachery"

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:

Chapter 5

With The Avengers

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Captain America

The Great Gold Steal

by Ted White

The long out-of-print first Captain America novel!

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE GREAT GOLD STEAL "Chapter 3: Rebirth!"

CHAPTER 3

REBIRTH!

“Rogers,” General Anderson said quietly, as the car began its trip back to Manhattan, “if you could change anything about yourself, what would it be?”

“Be, sir? You mean like smarter, bigger, tougher, like that?”

“Like that, yes.”

“Well, I suppose every man who’s something less than physically perfect wishes he had a new body.”

“Yes, exactly. And would you like a new body?”

Rogers turned to stare openly at the general. “Sir? I don’t get the joke.”

Anderson smiled. “No joke. Seriously, we are in a position to offer you, well, not a new body, but—a better one.

“As you know, you were selected to be among our guinea pigs for a new experimental project. That project is officially known as Operation Rebirth.

“If the experiment is successful, you will grow and develop a new, stronger, tougher, bigger body. And not only that: Your body will be able to withstand extraordinary punishment. Wounds should heal in half the usual time, or less. You should be almost entirely disease resistant. You’ll be able to function over a wider heat range—from numbing cold to blistering heat. Your metabolism will be capable of being speeded up at will. Sound good?”

Rogers nodded. “And—if the experiment is not successful?”

“I won’t mince words with you, son. It could kill you.”

The Hudson’s headlights picked out the sights of shabbily dressed men leaning against storefronts, others sitting or sprawling in doorways. Always nearby was the twisted brown paper bag, a bottle poking slyly out. Overhead, the Second Avenue El trains rumbled by, their vibration visibly shaking the rows of support pillars rising from the curbs.

This was the Lower East Side, a dismal slum that would not have changed appreciably long after the El tracks had been removed, and modern street lights installed.

Here the homeless bums, winos, the human derelicts lurked and lived. Here too, rats the size of cats fearlessly invaded shabby apartments to steal a starving family’s last remnants of food.

It was an anonymous place, the sort of area in which anything might go, because its denizens were an incurious lot, who accepted within their midst every kind of underworld scum. If one wanted privacy, there was no better place than among the teeming populace of the Lower East Side.

Brown swung the Hudson off onto a side street, and up to the curb. This street was a typical mixture. Side by side sat tenements, a rundown apartment building, a deserted warehouse with crude obscenities chalked on its doors; and, next to that, a dusty curio shop—the kind where one can buy or sell anything, few questions asked.

Brown remained in the car, while McInerney, letting Rogers and General Anderson out, led them directly across the sidewalk to the entrance of the curio shop. A bum, filthy, unshaven, reeking of alcohol, was sprawled across the doorway.

“Out the way, you,” McInerney snarled loudly. Then, in a whisper Rogers barely caught, he added, “Everything okay?”

The burn opened a surprisingly clear blue eye, winked and nodded, and then grumbled, “Okay, mister, okay.” He sidled off the step.

McInerney pushed into the shop, stepping aside to let the other two past, and then closed and locked the door. A bell over its sill jingled.

“Coming, gentlemen, coming,” called a querulous voice, and from the dim interior shadows of the shop stepped a huddled old woman.

“I believe you were expecting us,” the general said.

“I expect nobody,” she replied. Her hand brushed against her long full skirts, and then held an ugly short-muzzled automatic. “Your identification, please. Place it on the counter, then step back.”

Each of the three men in turn surrendered his papers, Rogers passing over his expressly issued photo-card.

The woman switched on a bright light which caught them in their faces. Rogers blinked and then closed his eyes. The light was blinding. Then it was off, and it was like a pressure being removed.

“Thank you, gentlemen. Shall we proceed?” She turned and started toward the back of the shop. McInerney scooped up the sets of identification papers and passed one to the general. “I’ll keep yours,” he told Rogers. “It wouldn’t do you any good when you come out, anyway.” With firm strides, the woman led them to a back stair, and up to a second-floor hall. Boxes, most of them open and full of old appliances, tea services, and other household oddments of other eras, lined and littered the length of the hall. Midway down, the woman motioned them to a stop, and squeezed between two stacks of boxes. Next, a crack of light appeared on the wall. The crack widened, and became a narrow open door.

Rogers tried to remember the layout of the building as he’d seen it from the outside. This hallway should be running down one side of the narrow shop. And the doorway was on the outside. That meant—she was leading them into the apparently abandoned warehouse next door.

Steve Rogers was to know that warehouse intimately, for he spent four weeks there, sometimes confined to his bed on the third floor, sometimes prowling the fourth-floor lab with Dr. Erskine, sometimes chatting with the security men on the second floor. It was only the first floor he never saw. And that, he had been told, was sealed off from the upper floors, a dusty, musty area that looked exactly like what it was—part of an abandoned warehouse.

The upper floors of the warehouse constituted one of the most advanced laboratories in the United States. Under the direction of Dr. Anton Erskine, pioneer research was being done into the biochemical areas of human physiology. Although Dr. Erskine delegated much of the work to his assistants, he alone held the key knowledge that crystallized their findings. “It is very simple,” he had once told General Anderson. “I can commit everything to paper, and sooner or later the wrong man will read it and steal it. Or I can keep it all locked in my memory, where I know it is safe. Eh?”

Steve Rogers had been analyzed. His entire body chemistry had been analyzed. The very genetic structure of his chromosomes had been broken down and catalogued. Dr. Erskine had already unlocked the secret of DNA and RNA—a secret which science would not penetrate again for two decades.

Now Steve Rogers’ body structure would be changed. It meant days of careful preparation. Everything followed the necessary sequence.

First his bones were strengthened. This was done in two different ways. The first was a series of operations on his arms and legs, in which stainless steel-slotted tubes were inserted within the marrow of his bones, adding enormous rigidity. Next, while his diet was heavily weighted with calcium, a series of chemical treatments built up the very structure of his bones, strengthening them, making them less brittle, more resistant to impact, and capable of carrying greater weight. During this period, Steve felt awkward and ungainly, like a wobbly colt just learning to walk. He had gained three inches in height, and his shoulders and chest had swelled. Yet he was underweight, skinny, and his new bones made it only more obvious.

Next came the muscle build-up.

Each day they injected him with chemicals, fed him enormous meals, rich in proteins—eggs, cheese, steak—and put him through wearying calisthenics. One part of the third floor had been fitted up as a gym, and each morning a burly man with little hair and a mashed ear would lead him through a series of torments designed to exhaust him completely. First, twenty laps around the gym and a workout on the chinning bars. Then the rowing machine. Then a nap and a meal. Then another twenty laps and pushups. And so on, into, it seemed, eternity.

He lost track of time and of the days. There were no windows in this building, and the hours passed in blurs.

But one day he walked past a mirror, and saw a stranger staring back at him. He paused, and looked wide-eyed at the sweaty Greek god in the glass. He looked at his heavy shoulders, the broad chest, thick biceps and triceps, the piston-like forearms, the supple, tapering waist, powerful thighs, and muscled calves. It was like looking at a total stranger. And yet it was he—Steve Rogers. He shook his head in amazement.

“You’re doing fine, son,” Dr. Erskine told him the next morning. “You’re living proof that my program can be successful. Can you see Hitler’s face, when we throw an entire army of guys like you at him?”

Rogers smiled, modestly. “It doesn’t seem real, sir. I guess I just haven’t had time to accept it. I’ve been so tired, so exhausted lately.”

“Of course. We’re speeding up the development of your body. It takes more food—energy—more rest and sleep. All that meat on you didn’t come from nowhere!”

“I’ve been worrying about that, sir. Are you sure it’ll stay? I mean, if I ever go back to a more normal life?”

“Don’t worry. What it all boils down to is your genetic pattern. Every cell in your body had imprinted in it the whole pattern of what you are, what you should look like. Theoretically, given one cell from your body, we could reconstruct you. This genetic pattern is what controls what you are—whether you have blue eyes or brown, how tall, how heavy you’ll be—everything.

“What we’ve done is to change your genetic pattern progressively. We’ve told your body that it shouldn’t look like it did—but rather the way it does now. Give it a normal amount of food and rest, and it will keep the new pattern. Don’t worry.”

“Is that all there is to it, sir?”

“No, we have a few more things to take care of. We want to give you a wider operating range. We want to give you faster reflexes—an altogether faster metabolism, in fact. And we want to increase your tolerances to heat and cold beyond the human norm. This will be the most dangerous part of our program because, you see, we’ll be tampering with aspects outside human normality. Up to now we’ve just shuffled your genes around within normal human limits. Now we’ll be attempting something nature has never tried.”

Rogers felt a chill come over him, a chill that had nothing to do with the perspiration still wet on his body from the early morning workout.

“You mean, sir, that I still stand a chance to lose all this? To come this far, and…?”

“Want to stop now?”

Rogers felt his face heat. “No sir. I volunteered for the whole program, and I’ll stick to it.”

“Good.”

The next twenty-four hours were the strangest Rogers had ever known. He was strapped into his bed, and given an injection.

It seemed only a pinprick-moment after the needle had been withdrawn from his arm that his sensations began to turn rubbery. His eyes were still open, but the room seemed to shift and recede into a vague combination of colors that clashed, and disturbed him. So he let his lids close, and a warm, rich blackness swept over him, all but drowning him, until he replaced it with new visions.

From some faraway place, he heard the drone of voices, sounding muffled and doleful, like a recording suddenly slowed to half its speed; deep drawling voices. They spoke words, but not in any way intelligible to him.

The voices disturbed him, so he willed them to stop, and spun them away from him. He watched them recede like distant comets into the black infinity of space. Then he somersaulted himself one hundred and eighty degrees, and set off in the opposite direction.

He was hallucinating, he knew that. In one astonishingly lucid portion of his brain he was totally aware of everything going on, of the voices in the room, and what they were saying (it would be filed away in his memory to be taken out and examined later), of his own strange reaction, and of the vast vista of wonderment opening up before him.

He felt like a child, bright-eyed and eager, while, coldly aloof but not unfriendly, his superego sat upon his shoulder, observing, recording, making a note of everything, interfering in nothing.

What did it all mean? It didn’t have to mean anything at all. Experience was its own justification. Being was being.

Later, when he described his experiences, or attempted to describe them, to Dr. Erskine, the man shook his head wearily and said, “Perhaps you have undergone a transcendental experience. Or perhaps you just went temporarily mad.”

“Mightn’t it all be the same thing, sir?”

“I don’t know. I’m an old man. I’ve never fully accepted Freud. Jung I can’t understand. I just dabble with chemicals. I don’t know.”

And Rogers had felt sorry for him; sorry for any man who could do so much, and still not know.

Gradually the hallucinations ceased and he found himself returning to his own body. Yet it was a different body, different from both his first, scrawny body, and from the new physical perfection of the second.

The difference was that of control.

For the first time in his life, he felt truly aware of his body’s functions and abilities. He caught the sound of his heart pumping, and then the feel of it. He followed the surges of blood throughout his entire circulatory system, and in the process became aware of his nervous system—that vast communications network of nerve ganglia. He followed the autonomous functions back into a portion of his brain he had never known before, connecting it as he went with his ductless gland system, with its manufacture, control, and release of body and brain chemicals and hormones. Here, in this newly discovered part of his brain, he found the origin of the messages which controlled his heartbeat, connected the smell of food with the salivation glands in his mouth, and performed all the other bodily functions normally beyond the awareness and control of a human being.

And with his awareness came control.

He found himself speeding then slowing, his heartbeat. He deliberately increased the amount of adrenalin in his bloodstream. He manipulated his optical nerves, and tightened his optical muscles to correct his nearsightedness. Bit by bit, he took a tour of inspection of his own body, making corrections as he went, easing out malfunctions here, tuning up a little there, until he not only knew exactly how every aspect of his body functioned, but had put it all into perfect operating order.

Then he fell asleep.

When he awoke, he felt more refreshed than he had ever felt before in his life. He was puzzled for a long moment. Then memory came flooding back over him. He lay still, his eyes closed again, until he felt he had digested it all, and understood it.

He no longer felt that total control—that tuned awareness of his body. Yet he knew that he remained in control, if only subconsciously. The injection he had been given—he didn’t know what it was—had placed him in that lucid state in which he had checked himself out so thoroughly. The drug was exhausted now, and he would be on his own. But enriched.

He felt amazed at all he had learned about himself. He had known, in a vague and meaningless sort of way, that the human body has great reserves of strength and power which it normally never uses, but the knowledge had never meant much to him; he had felt too far removed from the reality of it.

He had gone to a show once, where a hypnotist had put a volunteer into a trance, told him to become as stiff as a board, and then had demonstrated the man’s amazing reserve of strength by positioning his head on one chair, his heels on another, while directing other volunteers to sit and stand on his unsupported torso.

It meant something now. Steve Rogers knew that if the occasion ever arose, he had a great reserve of power he could call upon and will into use. He knew too that he could speed or slow his reflexes at will. There would be a price paid, of course, for each feat of strength and will. The energy needed would have to come from somewhere. He could deplete his body badly if he didn’t restore it with additional sleep and food—the sleep to rid his body of toxins, the food to refuel it.

He pulled himself upright and sprang to his feet. Now he could truly understand and appreciate the new body he had been given. Now he could exult in it!

Tomorrow:

Chapter 4

Nazi Treachery

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Captain America

The Great Gold Steal

by Ted White

The long out-of-print first Captain America novel!

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE GREAT GOLD STEAL "Chapter 2: Who is Captain America?"

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.

Tomorrow:

Chapter 3

Rebirth!

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Captain America

The Great Gold Steal

by Ted White

The long out-of-print first Captain America novel!

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE GREAT GOLD STEAL "Chapter 1: Death by Laser!"

Chapter 1

Death by Laser

In Lower Manhattan there squats a heavy gray building. Although over a dozen stories tall, it seems hemmed in by the tall skyscrapers that surround it.

This is New York City’s financial district. Across the narrow street downtown from the gray building is the beautiful Chase Manhattan Plaza—headquarters for one of the world’s largest commercial banks. A little to the east is Bankers Trust. A new building is going up on the southwest, which will also house a bank, and yet another is rising directly north. All of these buildings are or will be giants, and they tower high over the heavy gray building, cutting it off from sunshine and the sky.

But this forbidding structure dominates them all.

A dark gray Continental swung east off Broadway, on Liberty Street. It was 7:30 p.m., and the color was already gone from the chill fall air. Cabs still cruised the narrow, canyon-like streets, but most of the office workers had left for the night. The tall, thin man with the bald head threaded his Continental effortlessly through the thinning traffic, swinging left again into Liberty Place, a gloomy alley-like street only a block long. A no-parking sign stood at the curb, but the bald-headed man gave a negligent twist to his wrist and, aided by power steering, bumped his big car up over the curb, and to rest, half blocking the sidewalk. There was only scant room for other cars to slip past, but it didn’t appear to concern the man. There was little traffic on this neglected street, anyhow.

The man remained seated behind the wheel for several moments, apparently lost in thought. Passersby, what few there were on this early night, would have given him only a token glance. Sitting in the luxurious car, wearing a handsome dark topcoat and a black Homburg, the tall thin man appeared obviously a part of his surroundings; a banker perhaps, certainly a financier.

A smile tugged at his lips. He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a gold cigarette case. It held extra-long filter cigarettes. As he removed it, something else fell into his lap, a money clip, a few bills folded into it.

He started to return the money to his pocket and then, instead, separated a bill and stared at it thoughtfully.

It was a single dollar bill, one of the new ones. These did not say “Silver Certificate” on them; they were not backed by silver.

“Only by promises…” the man murmured to himself. “And we’ll see about those.”

The bill was a Federal Reserve Note, Series 1963 A. To the left of the portrait of George Washington was a seal, with the large letter “B” in its center. “Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York,” it said.

One block further east was Nassau Street. On the other side of Nassau sat the gloomy gray building, its sides bounded by Liberty Street, Nassau Street, Maiden Lane, and William Street. Its walls were great blocks of sooty granite. Its windows were heavily barred.

“B”.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York. 44 Maiden Lane. The bank that dominates all the banking in New York City, financial capital of the world.

The tall, bald man held the dollar bill for a few silent moments, his lips pursed, his thin fingers precise and motionless. Then he shrugged, returned the money to his pocket, and took out a cigarette.

He sat a few moments more, smoking the cigarette, and then glanced at his watch. 7:45p.m.

Pulling the coat tighter and buttoning it, he eased open the door and stepped out. Pausing only to lock the car, he moved quickly down the street to the middle of the short block.

This was a neglected street, bypassed by the expansion of the financial district, beckoning no new construction. The buildings here were old commercial buildings—lofts and stores, a lunch counter, a stationery store, a job printer, a messenger service. The storefronts were grimy, and looked forlorn. The bald-headed man couldn’t have cared less.

He turned between two commercial entrances and pushed open the grime-encrusted door of a little-used hallway. One faint twenty-watt bulb dangled on a frayed cord from the ceiling. Rubbish lurked in the corners.

Stairs led upward to the right; instead he ducked to the left, under them. He groped for a minute, then clicked on another light. This one showed stairs leading down. They were wooden, covered with metal cleats, and the man made his way down slowly and carefully.

When he reached the basement, he pushed his way into the dim shadows and around. cans piled high with junk and refuse. If the dust on the handles was any indication, these cans had not been emptied since the outbreak of World War II.

Shelves cluttered with miscellaneous junk leaned against the basement walls, and the man walked up to them, and reached under a low one.

A thin, high-pitched whine began and, as though on newly oiled casters, the entire section of shelves rotated smoothly out from the wall.

He reached through the opening now revealed and flicked another switch. Immediately the light at the stairs went out, and a new one beyond came on. He moved quickly through the concealed doorway, and the shelves, servo-mechs whining again, slid back into place.

Quite another sort of man was cautiously easing out of a dark subway tunnel onto a station platform.

He was short, thick-bodied, the muscles standing out on his exposed neck and forearms. The passengers standing and waiting on the subway platform paid no attention to him. He was wearing coveralls, a faded blue denim, and looked not unlike a track worker, one of those men who perennially rove the subway tunnels under the great city looking for and making necessary track repairs.

His hair was dark and grizzled with gray specks. It came low on his brow and, combined with the bushy eyebrows just below, gave him a simian look—the look of a man of low intelligence, but of a certain animal craft and cunning.

Soon a train was rumbling out of the tunnel, its brakes screeching in tortured protest as it came to a halt. The doors slid pneumatically open, and the simian-looking man boarded the train with the other waiting passengers.

The train became an express only a few stops further uptown, and it was only a matter of some ten or fifteen jolting minutes before it was stopping in the 86th Street station.

The short, heavy-set man rose and, shouldering his way past two girls at the door, stepped hastily off the train. The two girls stared past him in indignation. “Did you see that?” one of them said to the other. She fingered her nose. “I wonder when the last time was, he took a bath.”

“People like that they shouldn’t let onto these trains,” the other girl agreed. The doors slapped shut, and the train started up again. Soon the pillars of the station were a blur, and the dark thick man gone from sight.

When he climbed to the street, the man turned west. He walked in short, pumping strides, his stubby legs covering distance within an amazingly short time. The dark late-model Ford sedan, with only its parking lights on, had no trouble pacing him.

There were two men in the car. They were both young, and looked younger. Each was crewcut, each wore impeccable Ivy League suits, dark and a little conservative for present fashion. One man was a sandy blond; the other had dark hair. That was about the only visible distinction. Both were freshly shaved—and as a matter of fact, the odor of after-shave lotion still lingered within the closed confines of the car. They looked like assistant junior executives, on their way up.

The short man in the coveralls turned south on Madison Avenue, which is one-way for vehicles heading uptown. The driver of the Ford cursed for a moment.

“Don’t sweat it,” the other said. “We know where he’s going. He has to be.”

“Right.,

The Ford went a block further west, to Central Park and Fifth Avenue, a one-way street downtown. The light was just turning red, but Dark Hair cut the corner and jabbed the accelerator viciously, and the car skinned through the light.

Ahead, the lights, all timed, began turning green just before the Ford reached each intersection.

They didn’t go far, but cut left again on a cross street.

“Blasted one-way streets,” Dark Hair muttered.

“Ease off. We’ve got plenty of time,” Sandy Hair answered. “He’s on foot, remember?”

“Yeah, but these streets—these lights! It’s enough to drive ya batty. I gotta go all the way around three sides of the square before I can get there, and meantime—here we sit!”

The light turned green, and the Ford turned left again, up Madison Avenue.

The light at the next block was red and, just as they pulled up to it, Sandy Hair said, “Hey! There he is!”

The short, simian man was just turning the corner ahead of them.

Dark Hair shifted his foot from the brake to the gas and, with tires chirping, swung left through the red light.

Behind them a horn sounded angrily. Ahead, their quarry gave a sudden startled glance over his shoulder, then tucked his head down, hunched his shoulders, and began to run.

The Ford’s headlights held him pinned for a timeless moment and, in that moment, Sandy Hair leaned out his window, gripping a long, thin tube in his tightly clenched fist and his crooked elbow. A wire ran from the tube to under the car’s dash.

The headlights dimmed, then brightened.

A scarlet needle probed into the running man’s back.

He kept on running, his arms pumping, legs churning.

The Ford’s headlights swept beyond him, and then the car was accelerating past him. Its taillights winked once, and then it had made the corner and was gone.

The man was still running. Only his arms jerked up and down erratically, and his feet kept stumbling.

The man was still running as he fell.

A tall, well-muscled man strode back and forth across a lavishly furnished room. His thick blond hair was tousled, and every so often his right hand would rise, as if by its own volition, to push absently through his hair again.

“This inactivity,” he muttered to himself. “It’s got me climbing the walls. It’s got me talking to myself, just to hear my own voice.” And it brought back memories, memories he didn’t want to face, memories of other days, other places, other people. Memories of people lost—and dead.

On his bed were strewn a half-dozen paperback books:

One was a science-fiction novel. Another was a detective mystery. There were two Westerns, a brittle modern comedy, and a war novel. The war novel had been a mistake. Reading—or trying to read—had been a mistake anyway but, after starting the war novel and throwing it down after five pages, it was useless to try to escape into the pages of any of the other books.

He couldn’t quite get interested in the plight of the helpless homesteader against the ruthless cattle baron.

The kooky life of a square kid with Greenwich Village parents didn’t even bring a smile. And the science-fiction novel—all about invaders from the twenty-sixth century—seemed, like the detective novel, to blend too many fantastic memories with too many melodramatic absurdities.

The door opened, and a balding man in livery poked his head in.

“Ah, Mr. Rogers, sir? There seems to be a disturbance in the street. I thought you might…?”

Rogers whirled to face the smaller man, turning so suddenly that he startled him. His face lit with a grin. “What’s happening?”

“Ah, a man, sir. He collapsed on the sidewalk. I don’t know what else…”

Rogers pushed his lithe body past the other and hurried out into the hall, down the heavily banistered stairs.

Still hatless and coatless, he burst out of the front door to see a small group of people clustered in a knot just down the sidewalk.

One of the men was saying, “Looks like a drunk to me.”

“No, no,” insisted a teenaged girl. “They shot him! I saw it!”

“I didn’t hear any shots,” sniffed a matronly woman in furs.

“Why doesn’t somebody call a doctor?” the girl asked.

“He could be dying!”

“If you ask me, he’s just had a few too many,” repeated the first man.

“More and more of them drifting over here all the time,” the matronly woman stated. “I don’t know what we’re paying the police for!”

Rogers elbowed his way into the group, and knelt at the man’s side. Expertly, he lifted the man’s wrist and felt for a pulse. It took him a while to find one; it was weak and erratic.

“Let’s have some air, please,” he said, addressing the crowd. “Has anyone called the police?”

“Well!” the matronly woman announced. “I’m sure if anyone had, they’d have been here by now!”

“Well, then,” Rogers said, looking up over his shoulder, “why don’t you get them?”

“Me? Why, I never!”

“Did anyone see what happened?” Rogers asked, ignoring her.

“I did,” said the girl. “He was running down the street and this car was chasing him, and a red ray came out of it and it knocked him down!”

“Ahhh, bushwaw,” an older man said in tones ringing with disgust. “She’s been seeing too many James Bond movies, mister. This car, see, it ran the light and some- body honked at it, and that’s all she saw. This guy was blind, staggerin’ drunk, that’s all.”

“Really,” Rogers said. “Strange—I smell no alcohol on him.”

“Yeah? You a doctor or something?”

Rogers ignored him, and began easing the man over, onto his back.

The man’s dark brows grew close together, then relaxed. He gave a racking cough, his mouth opening and closing convulsively. Blood drooled from the corner of his mouth. Those who saw it gasped and drew back.

“Hey!” It was the same man. “You a doctor, or what? What are you doing to that man?” He reached down and plucked at Rogers’ sleeve.

The big blond man’s eyes narrowed momentarily and his muscles tensed. “Keep your hands off me,” he said in a voice that was not loud, but somehow carried its threat effectively. The man drew back hastily.

On the pavement, the dying man’s eyes opened. For a moment his gaze was clear and lucid.

“Cap—Captain America,” he gasped, and then began choking and coughing. “Gotta get to him…”

A peculiar gleam came into Rogers’ eyes then, but no one saw it. The man on the sidewalk said nothing more. His breath seemed to hack once or twice, and then he was still.

Totally still.

Dead.

Manhattan Island is riddled with tunnels. These tunnels serve as the veins and arteries that keep this, the most important part of New York City, alive. Through small tunnels thousands of miles of wires and cables are laid to bring light and electricity as well as telephone communications to everyone who needs or wants them. Other tunnels carry the gas mains, water, and sewage. But the most important tunnels for many New Yorkers are the subway tunnels, for through these speed the multitude of trains which carry over four million people daily to and from work, and carry many more midday shoppers, evening theatergoers, and people who just need to get from one part of this vast city to another easily and cheaply. The subways are the backbone of the city. Without them—as subways strikes have proven—the city is reduced to chaos, for no city’s streets could handle the number of cars that would be necessary for a population of over eight million.

Subways honeycomb Manhattan, for Manhattan is the focus of the city. But few people realize that, although the New York City subway system has not stopped growing, its subterranean network is still greater than that which is in use.

Children who stand gawking at the front of the first car in a subway train sometimes catch glimpses of branching tunnels, shadowy, unlit, tracks rusting. But when they ask their fathers, those worthy gentlemen are wont to scratch their heads and mutter, “I dunno, son. I guess that’s just something they never finished.”

One of the tunnels they never finished is in Lower Manhattan—in the financial district. It was to be part of a line constructed just before World War I, linking Lower Manhattan with Brooklyn.

The workers in those days were often immigrants, fresh off the ship from the Old Country, and eager for the money said to be lying in the gutters of the cities of America.

They didn’t find streets of gold, but they found a bustling, growing city, and one still eager for unskilled labor and the brawny back.

They poured into the construction trades, wielding picks, shovels and, later, power hammers and other more demanding tools. But in 1912, they used mostly their broad backs, cutting and shoveling through the underpinnings of Manhattan, digging tunnels where the ground was soft enough, resorting to the sledgehammer, the hand-held drill, and dynamite where it wasn’t. They were a tough lot, working and cursing, long, hot, dark days, deep under the city streets.

These men were a superstitious lot, often uneducated, steeped more in the lore of Europe and the Old Country than in the science of industrial America. They believed in magic, in vampires, in the Evil Eye—and in trolls.

Trolls are said to be evil ogres who dwell underground, far from the sun’s rays. They are terrible creatures, and no man, no matter how toughly muscled, would want to meet up with one.

One day—who can say for sure?—a man, a tunnel digger, working on the new stretch of subway tunnel that would link Manhattan with Brooklyn, saw a troll.

He said he saw a troll.

Does it matter? He may have seen only the reflection in a bit of quartz from his own lantern.

Or he may have seen the red gleam of the eyes of a troll.

It made no difference. He told his fellow workers. The story spread. He’d seen a troll.

That section of the subway was blocked off. The city authorities didn’t believe in trolls. But they were faced with a working force which did. And those men, those strong, tough, superstitious men, wouldn’t work in that tunnel. It was connected with a cavern of the trolls, they said. They didn’t want to dig a subway at all. But the authorities—at no small expense—authorized a change in the routing of the tunnel. They ordered the tunnel head blocked off. They ordered a new tunnel to detour around the abandoned working.

And the construction went on, and the subway line was completed, opened, used, and is still used today by thousands of people.

The abandoned tunnel?

It ran under Liberty Street, coming to a halt near Nassau Street. Right near Liberty Place.

Almost directly under the illegally parked Continental.

Tomorrow:

Chapter 2

Who is Captain America?

Spoiler Alert: The dead guy's identity will surprise you!

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