“How do you select a time? There are no dials or settings we could see.”

Lucy smiled. This would seal his disbelief. “It says in the book that you pull the handle and just think about the time you want to be in.”

Casey blinked once and chuffed a disgusted laugh. “Oh, great. I get the really good assignments.”

“Okay. I know it sounds a little out there,” Brad admitted. “That’s why we’ve got to try it. If we’ve spent a lot of someone’s money powering a machine that doesn’t do anything, better to know that now. If it’s a hoax, all the Italians have is a fortune in tourist dollars when they put it on display in the Uffizi. But if it’s not, then we’ve got something everybody is going to want.”

Lucy was dismayed at Casey’s look of speculation. He couldn’t be considering powering up the machine, could he?

“And then this wasn’t such a crappy assignment after all,” Brad continued. “In fact, you can probably name your next one.” Brad really struck a chord with that. Casey thought he’d drawn a crappy assignment and he was now thinking how nice it would be to come up with something incredible no one ever expected. “So why don’t we test it out? Right here. Tonight.”

No, no, no. Definitely not. Lucy looked around wildly. The machine seemed to be vibrating in satisfaction. “Wouldn’t . . . wouldn’t that be bad scientific method? You should do a . . . a controlled experiment.” Brad was always talking about controlled experiments.

“Well, we’ve got a problem,” Brad said, his eyes on Casey. “We can’t go to my boss, or your boss, and tell them we’ve got a time machine. We’d be laughed out of the office.”

“Well, yeah,” Casey said, dripping sarcasm. “I guess we would.”

“Unless we had proof. Come on, Casey.” Brad was on a roll. Sure of himself. “You want prestige and power. If it works, you’re in like Flynn. A time machine built by Leonardo da Vinci and powered by our project?” It must have killed him to share the credit for the project.