Susan, his granddaughter, grew into a pleasingly plump young woman in an age where the ideal seemed to be total emaciation. She was not only single but disillusioned and despairing when the lawyers looked her up and gave her Edgar's letter.
A good part of what Edgar had written sounded like confused mysticism, warnings about upsetting the future and the like, but his instructions were specific enough and she read them as if they were the lost book of Revelations.
By the next day, she had flown from San Francisco to New York and gained entry to young Edgar Evans' room by telling his landlady she was a distant relative. She disconnected the scrambler from the time machine and reset the controls to put herself back in 1891. In her haste, she forgot some of Edgar's instructions, with the result that she landed not fittingly costumed, but bare as a bacchante, in the room of a handsome young man from Louisiana.
The young man, whose name was Hare, was too startled to be anything but a Southern gentleman at the time. In less than a month, however, he took her back to Baton Rouge for inspection by his family and, that ordeal successfully weathered, Susan found herself with a husband.
There is no need to follow all of Susan's life, which was happy, sad, unique and filled with minor tragedies and triumphs, like any other life. But Susan had four sons and gave the gene to each of them, and their children received it in turn. Before she had thought it necessary to pass the secret of the machine to Edgar's great-great-grandchildren, Susan died, so the machine was not available to them.
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.