“Get me some pliers!” he shouted.

Leni and Pugh scrabbled around the laboratory.

“There aren’t any!” Leni yelled.

“There must be!”

Meanwhile, Lockhart tightened up the remaining four nuts. Would that be enough? Would the eleven bolts and the rubber seal suffice?

“For Christ’s sake!” he shouted. “There have to be some! We’re in a bloody factory!”

Lockhart looked at his watch. There was only a minute to go. The firing was hard to ignore now; it was getting close, very close.

“I’ve got some!” shouted Pugh.

“Throw them here!”

Pugh did so, but his throw went wide, causing Lockhart to have to rummage for them under a workbench. He reached for the offending wing nut, and with all his strength, twisted it. At first it wouldn’t budge, but with another wrench it did so. As quickly as he could, he screwed it down, and as it reached the end of the bolt, he noticed the lid closing onto the still a fraction tighter. That, he thought, might make all the difference.

The guards were no more than ten yards away. Strasser had only one magazine left, and the others were running similarly low. Sooner or later, a machine gun would be brought up, and then they would be decimated. He desperately wanted to know if he had bought Lockhart enough time, but he couldn’t run and find out. Perhaps Lockhart was already dead, perhaps he had already failed, and this battle was just a senseless massacre. But Strasser had faith in Lockhart, an instinctive belief that because Lockhart was right, he would win. It was the only straw that Strasser had left, and he clutched it tightly.

They stood around the still, as if they were communing with it, Lockhart thought. With only thirty seconds to go, they all knew that the steel container in front of them could be the means by which they were transported to another world. In that sense, it did have the power of a divinity; it was something that could be communed with. In these last few seconds, Lockhart thought of Anna and Amy, playing images of them through his head, remembering them at their happiest moments—in Crete, on their wedding day, at Amy’s birth. He had loved, and he had been loved, and that was enough.