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The Hertford Manuscript is a 10,000-word story by Richard Cowper, a sequel to H. G. Wells' novel The Time Machine, recounting how, after the events of the novel, the Time Traveler went to 17th century England. It was first published in the October, 1976 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

The narrator’s elderly aunt dies in 1958, and in her will she leaves him a very old book from the 17th century which she had purchased from the Hertford collection many years earlier. In the back of the book are about 20 pages, written in a hand different from the hand which wrote most of the book. His aunt, in her youth, had been a friend of H. G. Wells, and she had claimed that both she and Wells had known the man on whom the novel The Time Machine was based. The account written at the back of the Hertford manuscript is a first person account of that time traveler, describing what happened to him after returning from the time of the Morlocks and Eloi.

He says that the Morlocks had damaged his time machine, making it difficult for him to control when his time machine would come to a stop. He ended up in the year 1665. When he realized that one of the machine’s crystals would have to be replaced, he walked to London to find a lens grinder to make a new one. He traded his watch to the lens grinder for the new crystal, but before it was finished he contracted the Plague, to which he succumbed a few days later.

The narrator does his best to verify the story, and he does find a few corraborating facts, but not enough to prove conclusively what he and his aunt believe—that this man really had built a time machine, and had died in the 17th century.

Reprints

This story is reprinted in Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1977 Annual World's Best SF.

External Links

• The Hertford Manuscript at ISFDB.org

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