Earth Is Missing!

87th Century Earth, entombed in a relentless, mile-thick coat of ice—its buried cities groaning in slow-congealing despair—still dreaded far more a bestial horror, known only as The Bear. For that monster with a human brain was threatening to steal the world !
The searchlights playing across the building's dark windows, the police cordon holding back the crowd—the telenews cameras ate it up.
The telenewsmen never seemed to care whether they got in the way of a stray shot or not. They had the video cameras set up right out in the middle of the icy street. The announcer was talking rapidly into his portable mike.
They've got the building surrounded now, folks! For those who faded in late, this is your teletabloid reporter bringing you an on-the-spot picture....
The picture was being reproduced on television screens throughout the ice-bound world, in London, Moscow, Singapore, New York—in New York's buried city in particular. It was happening there. New Yorkers crowded around their screens in the bright plastic salons deep in the vita-lamped society levels, in the tidy middle-class apartments several miles nearer the surface, even in a dingy hovel just under the earth's frozen crust, a few blocks from where the scene was being enacted, a sallow-faced tenement family was gathered around an ancient Eightieth Century television set.
It's one of The Bear's gang, folks! Although the rest of the gang got away after this morning's Radium Bank stick-up, the police wounded one of them. They've trailed him to this vacant building high in the upper levels and—Wait! What's this! A plainclothes man just went in the building! He went in there alone ....
... It was dark inside.
Johnny Steel flashed his light on the stairs. There was the same red trail that had brought them here—blood, frozen as it fell. He cut the light off again instantly, pausing till his eyes got used to the darkness again. The heavy pistol was cold in his hand.
Perhaps he was crazy, coming in here alone! The Homicide Squad had certainly thought so when he'd ordered them to wait outside.