The Day Before Tomorrow by Nicola Rhodes

on the thirteenth floor that peace talks had broken out in several areas.  It was looking very much as if the apocalypse might have to be cancelled – or at least postponed.  The humans should have been arming their nuclear weapons by now, but there was no sign of this happening.  It would never happen either, as long as humans still had hope.  Until all hope was lost from men’s hearts, they would never destroy the world. 
     
    Clive, a minor file clerk on level C was watching the situation with great interest.  He was himself looking for the missing box, although he had not yet decided what he would do with it if he found it.  It was unheard of for a file clerk to break out in this erratic fashion, although Clive had done it before.  And thinking as an individual can become habit forming, one might almost suspect that he had a mind of his own. 
     He knew very well why the dim-wits upstairs wanted it so badly, but Clive had ambitions of his own
    Thus, he wanted to find the box for himself, and his unique experiences of human beings meant that he was capable of thinking in ways that his colleagues were completely unable to comprehend.  He was fairly confident that he could find it before they did, unless they had the most unbelievable good luck.
    For example, he knew that an immutable law of the universe is the one that states that wherever the thing you have lost is, it is always in the last place that you look.  By utilising quantum, surely he could eliminate the “looking for it” part and just get straight to the “finding it” part.  Another immutable law tends to be that if you have an important box (or case or file-folder) it is usually on top of the wardrobe.  Sometimes it is in the foot of the wardrobe or in the cupboard under the stairs.  Or, occasionally, in the chest of drawers in the spare room.  Having decided on this, and realising that these would be the first places he would look, he could eliminate these possibilities.  What did that leave, apart from the attic, or down the back of the sofa?  No, that was loose change – whatever that was. 
    They, that is, the dim-wits upstairs, were currently trying to trace the box back through history.  The last known possessor of the box had been Zeus, but he no longer existed, and anyway, it would be just like him to leave it lying about somewhere. 
    ‘The fools!’ thought Clive.  That was not the way to find it, he knew.  Nor was trying to find it by magic. They had tried that too, throwing various locator spells into the ether.  He understood the theory behind it.  After all, the only thing that could shield a magical object, strangely enough, was Tupperware – and what were the chances?  On the other hand, what they had failed to realise, was that the box itself was not magical in any way.  It was just a box.  And hope is not magic, although it is an item of faith, and Clive could see where they might get confused. 
    He realised that he himself was stumped, but he was not giving up.  He was better than his cohorts at human thinking, but not as good as a real human.  That was what he needed.  And as luck would have it, he had, in the past, had actual contact with real human beings, another unheard of innovation of his own – talking to the people – and these were not just any people, they were distinctly heroic types.  There was just one problem … 
     
    Clive did not know how it had been done and, therefore, he had no idea how to fix it.  Oh he could see it clearly enough, and it was damned clever, he thought, and dammed inconvenient – particularly for the people involved he supposed, but he was only thinking about himself at the moment.  He realised that there was nothing he could do this time; they would have to sort it out for themselves.  All he could do was watch in frustration.  Watch and hope.  But maybe he could help a little. 
    * * *
    ‘Where the hell is my wife?’  Denny snarled. 
    The soldier was