Not that it mattered--knowledge was available, for young Andover Hare had studied electronics at M. I. T. In 1962, he built his own time machine, which was a considerable improvement over Edgar's, since it could select place as well as time. Andover contacted his brothers, sisters and cousins, helped them make their arrangements and passed them through to the times they selected. Being a considerate man, he allowed several relatives by marriage to go along on this mass temporal migration. They did not restrict themselves to the '90s. Some went back to the 1700s, two to the Italian Renaissance, and one adventurous cousin clear to the Second Crusade. Andover himself decided he would like to know Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. He was the last one through the machine and he left a small, efficient detonator connected to it. Andover had Edgar's gene, but not his compunctions. * * * * * Yes, we owe a lot to Edgar Evans. When Edgar was a grave and unchubby one-year-old, pulling himself up on the furniture, _Gone With the Wind_ hit the populace right in the middle of their worries, vague fears and faintly stirring desires to get out of their increasingly complex world. The year was 1936, a year that also saw a period piece movie that was one of the first in the inevitable deluge--_The Great Ziegfeld_ drew, as customers, many of the bearers of Edgar's gene, enough to make a profit-conscious Hollywood see mint-green. The year neighbors searched the wreckage of Edgar's home to pull him from under the body of his mother, hunched in a last protective gesture, was the year that saw American history searched frantically for movie material. It was '39 and _Dodge City_ and _Union Pacific_ helped thousands of Edgar's descendants forget momentarily the distant rumble of war. Historical novels were also helping to glamorize the past. By the time Edgar had graduated from school, been rejected by the Army and worked for a time, the cold war was well advanced. Three generations were mind-sick with tensions and fears and doubts--heart-sick with the impossible wish to roll back the years to times of peaceful, neighborly, unfrenzied human living. Edgar did. And the next time, in 1959, Susan went back. For most of us, 1959 came only once, the year of the crisis when the missiles had already been launched from both sides before the astonishing "thieves' agreement" was reached and the missiles were aimed into the sea. There could be nothing but relief for a few months after that, but then the play on nerves began again, the tensions began their unbearable rise. In 1962, Susan's grandchildren were funneled like sacks of coal through Andover Hare's machine. There were eighteen of them and a group of their descendants built another machine later the same year. The following March, another group disappeared--a much larger one this time. They spread the gene so widely that most of us bear it today.