Johann Schmidt first heard rumors about the secret of the Chrysler Building in 1944. Operations in North America were not his department, but he was the kind of agent who liked to keep tabs on what his colleagues - and potential rivals - were up to, and it had amused him to hear of Skorzeny's frustrations in New York. The claim was that the building's decorative crown was actually the façade for a powerful defense system, one capable of protecting the city - possibly the entire eastern seaboard of the United States - by both sea and air, and rendering the continent impregnable to Nazi attack.

Of course, by then the very idea of attacking North America with anything short of the A10 rocket and Diebner's bomb was the merest pipe dream, and when Captain America hijacked the A10 and the bomb, well, that was the end of that. Skorzeny abandoned his efforts to penetrate the veil of mystery around the Chrysler Building's crown, returned to Europe, and took part in Operation Eisenfaust instead. The war went on. Rumors of New York's secrets faded into the background, were lost in the cacophony of the Third Reich's collapse, and vanished in the postwar silence.

Not even Schmidt thought about it again until centuries later, when the device's existence was dramatically proven in the closing days of the Federation Civil War. Because it was there, New York City had emerged from President Clark's mad attempt to scorch the Earth with only scratches.

Because it was there, the Red Skull was now here.

He supposed the honor of piercing the Chrysler Building's veil at last should have gone to Skorzeny, but such were the fortunes of war. Schmidt was the ranking officer in New York - indeed, the ranking officer on Earth! - and Skorzeny worked for him now. And so Skorzeny went to Liberty Island to divert as many of the IPO's people as possible with a symbolic gesture he knew to be entirely devoid of real strategic value.

With the city in chaos and the IPO's interlopers held up at several key points by various diversionary operations, gaining access to the building unnoticed had been simple; reaching the uppermost floor even more so. Finding the secret access to the level above that had been slightly more involved, but not overwhelmingly so. It was intended to evade casual discovery, not thwart a determined search by a clever intruder.

The Red Skull stood with his hands folded behind his back and just looked at it for a few moments. The room at the very top of the Chrysler Building put him in mind of a small, narrow cathedral, with its sharply sloping walls that soared up to the pinnacle of the building, uninterrupted by any ceiling. The room was dimly lit by shafts of dusty light that slanted in through narrow triangular windows - and by the blue-white glow of the object in the very center.

Schmidt had no mental comparison for this item. It looked like nothing he had ever seen before - a rostrum or pedestal of sorts, about five feet high, composed of metal flanges, ribbed and smooth pipes, and other, even less identifiable, but unmistakably technological features. The smooth pipes or tubes, as well as various seams and translucent panels around the surface, gave off the light, as though illuminated by some powerful but mostly hidden source buried deep within. It was surrounded by a brass railing, now dull from decades, even centuries, of neglect, and connected to the building's peak by an incongruously ordinary-looking cylindrical column that rose from the top of the device and merged straight into the convergence of the slanting walls. To one side of the device, just outside the railing, stood what was obviously a control panel, encrusted with dust and cobwebs.

Schmidt brushed away the worst of the debris with one gloved hand and ran his eyes over the controls. The system was utterly unfamiliar, but although brutal and vicious, Schmidt was a very intelligent man, and it didn't take him long to grasp the basic layout. Here were the controls that governed the system's passive modes; here were its sensors and targeting system; here the switches and dials that controlled its active usage. And here were the controls for maintenance.

"I must advise you not to touch that, Herr Schädel," said a voice behind him. He turned to see the tall, thin figure of Nikola Tesla standing at the edge of the room, his back to one of the tall triangular windows. With a disapproving look, he added, "I built this facility to protect the city from the Nazis, you know. I am hardly likely to permit a Nazi to destroy the city with it."

A lesser man would have asked the obvious but stupid question - "How did you get in here?" - but the Red Skull said only, "You're too late, Tesla."

Tesla's mouth quirked in a small smile. He began to walk, not toward Schmidt, but around the edge of the room, his pace measured and deliberate. As he walked, the Skull sized him up, looking for weapons. He appeared to be carrying none - he was dressed only in a dark, slightly old-fashioned suit and tie, as he always seemed to be - but the Skull knew by now that with Tesla, appearances were always likely to be deceiving.

As for Tesla, he, too, was examining his adversary, taking note of the fact that the Skull was wearing his full-dress SS uniform, armband and all.

"Still you fight for the glory of Hitler's Germany?" he asked, shaking his head, and then, still pacing around the room's perimeter, he began to recite in his soft, precise voice,

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"'"

The Red Skull would have sneered if he'd had lips in the ordinary sense of the word. "This place is your work," he pointed out sardonically.

Tesla nodded. "Yes. But you are Hitler's." Shaking his head sadly, he added, "Nothing beside remains, round the decay of that colossal wreck."

The Skull jerked his pistol from its holster and pointed it at Tesla, who had nearly reached a spot directly opposite him.

"I'd love to bandy words with you further, Tesla - you are the only Slav I've ever met who was even halfway bright - but time presses."

Tesla looked faintly insulted. "Really, Johann. A gun." He made a negligent gesture; the Skull recoiled, dropping the pistol, as electricity crackled over its surface and stung his hand. "I think we're both a bit beyond that phase at this point, don't you?"

Schmidt held his wrist in his hand for a moment, glaring at the inventor, teeth gritted. Then he smiled, inasmuch as a man with his face could smile, and clenched his fists.

"If you prefer that I beat you to death with my bare hands, Nikola, you only had to ask."

And with that, he sprang to the attack.

Johann Schmidt was one of the deadliest men in the galaxy. He had been trained as a saboteur, spy, assassin, agent provocateur, and commando - essentially, as the world's first super-soldier - by the finest masters of all the martial disciplines available in the Germany of the 1930s, and he'd kept his skills sharp and current ever since. Ageless and untiring thanks to derivations and distillations of his enemies' own superscience, he was a remorseless and efficient killer who could end a man's life more quickly than an ordinary person could dial a phone.

Nikola Tesla was not any of these things. He was perhaps the greatest inventor/engineer/technologist the human species had ever produced, but that wasn't necessarily important right now. After all, the Red Skull's old friend Arnim Zola might be humanity's most brilliant bioscientist, and the Skull could have killed him without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review.

Tesla was different, and the Red Skull knew it. Tesla - with the aid of some technology and a lot of room in which to work - had put down one of the toughest superhumans the Skull had ever met, Big Fire's infamous Shockwave Alberto in his day. He wasn't an ivory tower intellectual, all brains and no guts, and he had more muscle - and more idea how to use it - than his gangly frame and reputation for peaceability suggested. He was one of the IPO's Experts of Justice, and that title was not handed out lightly. So the Skull was under no illusion that this was going to be simple - but, with the limitless arrogance that so clearly characterized the man in the minds of all who knew him, he did expect it to be easy.

It was not.

Tesla's technology had advanced markedly in the nearly two decades since his legendary battle with Shockwave Alberto, as had his adeptness in using it. Though a peaceful man, he was no longer a pacifist in the strict sense of the word, as he had been in earlier, simpler times. As he had watched the galaxy darken throughout the first decade of the twenty-fifth century, and helped the IPO prepare to confront and hold back that darkness, he had come to embrace fully that organization's founder's unofficial motto: Qui desiderat pacem, praeparat bellum.

Whomsoever desires peace, let him prepare for war.

He was hampered by the close quarters and the fact that he couldn't unleash his most powerful weapons - his latest-model Electro-Gauntlets, no bulkier than an ordinary pair of evening gloves - without endangering the Deflectron Core, but Tesla still more than held his own. In five furious minutes of no-holds-barred hand-to-hand combat, he made the Red Skull know that he'd been in a real fight for the first time in years - maybe decades.

But he still lost, at least the first round.

Breathing hard - but not too hard, in order to keep from outraging the ribs he thought Tesla's onslaught had cracked - the Skull returned to the center of the room. Tesla, crumpled in the corner, was probably still alive, and he had been tempted to finish the man off, but it would have put him even further behind schedule, and Johann Schmidt did not like falling behind schedule. Mission first. Recreation later.

He went to the control console, found the section he thought pertained to maintenance again, turned one of those dials to the setting furthest to the left, flipped a couple of switches, then took hold of a lever and pulled it back. Despite their obvious neglect, the controls worked smoothly and easily. For a moment, nothing happened; then the column atop the central device moved upward. Dust sloughed off it as it moved, revealing that it was actually transparent, a crystalline pillar, socketed into the top of the machine. The machine's pure blue-white light poured from the opening where it had been seated. It rose perhaps four feet in silence, then halted. Schmidt threw another switch. From within the machine, a metal handle emerged, rising until he could see that it was the top of some kind of bracket - a bracket secured around that which he had really come here seeking.

It was a cube, about six inches on a side, and clearly the source of the machine's strange illumination. As he stood looking at it, Schmidt realized that he could not quite consciously register what it looked like. Sometimes he was convinced it was metallic, with a dull, titanium-like lustre - but then he blinked and became just as convinced that it was crystalline, its entire structure suffused with the blue-white glow that now filled the room. It seemed to be perfectly smooth and featureless, yet covered in strange, otherworldly markings, yet insubstantial and perhaps even containing the ghostly image of another, smaller cube within it.

How long he stood looking at it, trying in vain to fathom its dimensionally transcendent mysteries, he wasn't sure. He got hold of himself with a fierce effort of will, reminding himself sternly that losing oneself in contemplation of a hypercube was the act of a mental weakling, and reached toward the handle. There would be plenty of time to plumb the cube's mysteries once he had taken it with him back to the Alpenfestung... and plenty of time to unleash its might.

Tesla stirred, raised himself from the floor, and shook his head, feeling experimentally to determine that his jaw wasn't broken. Then he noticed the light and came fully back to his senses.

"Schmidt!" he barked, his voice sharp over the rising hum of the now-exposed cube. "For the love of God, don't touch that!"

The Skull turned his head and replied, "You're too late, Tesla. The tesseract is mine."

"Don't delude yourself," Tesla said. "That item is not a tesseract. At least not only a tesseract. It's far more than that - and far more dangerous."

"Was that supposed to discourage me?" the Skull asked. "I'm counting on its being dangerous. That's what I want it for." He took hold of the handle and drew the bracket - and the cube - out of the machine altogether. Its circuits and tubes remained illuminated as the cube and its holder came free, evidently holding a residual charge.

"Honestly, destroying the city would merely have been a side benefit," said the Skull, gazing covetously at the cube's glow. "The true prize is this."

"You're a fool. Just like your master." Tesla climbed to his feet, wiping blood from the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. "A greedy, destructive child, grabbing at anything shiny and dangerous-looking. You have no idea what that object truly is."

"Don't bother trying to insult me, Tesla," the Skull said. "This is your greatest achievement - and allowing me to become its master, your greatest failure."

Tesla shook his head. "You're wrong on both counts," he said. "You'll never master the Cube. You'll never even have the slightest inkling what it is. To you it merely represents power - power you think you can use to... what? Revive your mad Führer's long-dead empire? Plunge the Earth into a barbarism that will make the nightmare from which it just awoke seem like a passing fever dream in comparison? Deutschland über alles in all the galaxy? Viennese jackanapes!" he spat. "Just like Hitler, you're not even German!"

"Enough!" the Skull roared. "Goodbye, Tesla! The next time I see you, it will be to send you back to eternity. Until then, do me a favor and tell Steven I have not forgotten him." He reached to his belt and pressed a button on one of the small devices affixed there.

Nothing happened. The Skull glanced at the device, pressed the button again, then pressed it again. No response.

Tesla chuckled. "I designed this enclosure myself, Herr Schädel. Did you not think it would have occurred to me to prevent unauthorized teleportation within its boundaries?"

The Red Skull glared at him for a moment, but only a moment. That was all the time it took him to formulate Plan B. He pressed another key on his belt. This one activated an escape device based on a stripped-down version of Big Fire's already-stripped-down Emergency Battle Harness - basically, just the EBH's pop-up jetpack, which now tore through the back of the Skull's uniform jacket and began emitting a low whine as it powered up. With almost the same movement, he took a small grenade from his belt, thumbed the activator, and threw it over his shoulder, ducking as the blast blew a jagged hole in the wall behind him.

Then he picked up the pistol he had dropped earlier and fired it several times, not at Tesla, but into the vulnerable components of the Deflectron Core, causing it to begin sparking and guttering in a very dangerous-looking manner. Holstering his sidearm, the Skull transferred the cube in its bracket from his left hand to his right, turned, and made for the hole in the wall. He had just reached it when one of the arcs from the Core, shaped by the field emitters of Tesla's Electro-Gauntlets, touched his shoulder. He fell through the hole and out of the building, yelling incoherently as his right arm went numb... and the Cube dropped from his hand.

Tesla scrambled forward, warding off the discharges from the Core, and seized the bracket before the Cube could slide any closer to the edge; then, sparing only a glance for the fast-receding dot that was the fleeing Red Skull's jetpack exhaust, he turned to the Core's control board, reaching through sputtering jets of energy, and began working to keep the machine from destroying itself, the building, and a fair percentage of midtown.

At street level, a few seconds earlier, Theodore Roosevelt, Steve Rogers, and a contingent of TacDiv officers arrived just in time to dodge the stainless-steel shrapnel raining down from the Skull's impromptu exit.

What's your status, Dr. Tesla? Rogers inquired via his Lens, making sure to cut in all the other Lensmen on the island to the conversation.

The Cube is secure, but the Skull is making his escape, Tesla replied. I dare not pursue him with the Deflectron Core in this condition.

Blast, Rogers said. Then, keying his comlink, he declared aloud, "Any air assets in South Manhattan, this is Rogers. I need - "

"Steven," said Roosevelt.

Rogers paused. " - yes, Theodore?"

"Hold my hat, will you? There's a good fellow."

Not sure why he was doing so, Rogers took the battered campaign hat the former President was offering to him. Then he watched as Roosevelt turned to one of the TacDiv troopers and borrowed her S2-AM sniper rifle, turned, and raised the weapon to his shoulder. Two tense seconds ticked by as the glimmering dot of the Red Skull's jet exhaust grew ever smaller in the distance, heading south.

"Hmph," said Roosevelt, lowering the rifle. It was a clearly impossible shot now - the Skull had to be five miles away, not counting his altitude, which had to be considerable if his contrail could still be seen from street level in Midtown.

"I repeat, this is - " Rogers began -

- but Roosevelt simply made an adjustment to the rifle's teleoptic, snapped the weapon up again, took aim, and fired a single shot.

A palpable span of time later, a speck of fire bloomed in the distant sky, then spiraled down in a pall of black smoke toward the harbor.

"I do hope Herr Schmidt can swim," Roosevelt deadpanned, handing the rifle back to its owner.

"Of course, we found nothing but the wreckage of his jetpack," said Rogers with a sigh. "That could mean that he's dead and his body's gone out to sea, but more likely he was able to teleport away." He shook his head. "That's how things always end with the Skull and me."

IPO Chief Benjamin Hutchins nodded sympathetically. "I know the feeling," he said. "But try not to let it get you too down. You and the others did good work today. New York is secure now thanks to your efforts, and those of the other teams. Our ability to ensure the city's stability during the transition has been an example to the rest of the world - and to the galaxy at large - that we mean what we say when we talk about wanting a peaceful rebirth for a free Earth, and that we can back it up. And the Cube is now secure where the bad guys will never get hold of it again. Couldn't, even if they knew where it was."

"True," Rogers agreed. "I just wish so many of the Nazis hadn't gotten away. They'll be back. They always come back."

"We'll be waiting for them," Gryphon promised. "For now, get some rest, Steve. I have another job for you and Theodore in the morning. In Washington. And then Winston would like your help with a little something in London."

Rogers smiled. "You've been busy filling up my dance card," he said.

"Well, hey, you wanted to be a rock star... " said Gryphon with an affected shrug. Rogers laughed, clapped him on the shoulder, and left the room.

"The Chrysler Building" (Part III of the Manhattan Trilogy)
a New Frontier Mini-Story by Benjamin D. Hutchins with Geoff Depew
quotations from "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
and The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
Special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
© 2011 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited

"Bully."

Most sublime, sir.

-Droken

That sniper shot is one of my favorite tropey bits of all time.

--
Kokuten Daysleeper
RCW #13013
(Insert Witticism Here)

�They planned their campaigns just as you might make a splendid piece of harness. It looks very well; and answers very well; until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot; and went on.�
-- Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington