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I cannot find this but don't really know how to research possible sources for obscure stories like this. This might be from an old Analog Science Fiction mom had when I was growing up.

There is a great time travel short story about a man who can telepathically link to his future self and his past self. he starts able to just do a few minutes or seconds apart and works to develop the skill until he has a 2 week future and past self. He then proceeds to make tons of money on the stock market

He meets a woman who is fantastic but seems to block his temporal telepathy. He's overjoyed when he doesn't die after his two-week future self fails to check in, but concerned about this woman he starts dating around that time. She MUST be the cause of the block but he can't figure out how.

She has a necklace that prevents temporal shifts because she is un-stuck in time. she continually freewheels throughout time without control, and is only able to stay in one place because of the necklace.

He cannot make money picking stocks with her there, so she eventually agrees to use her freewheeling skill to get him copies of future newspapers so they can be together.

The story ends with the idea that maybe he can learn to freewheel with her and they can travel together and he thinks he's managed a few seconds at the end of the story.

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  • Was the term used actually "freewheeling" for her form of time travel?
    – FuzzyBoots
    Commented Sep 6, 2017 at 15:02
  • I don't remember. She travels forward and backwards through time as if she is a present moment that is moving along the setting of the timeline. it doesn't sound like she hops disconnectedly, but that she travels in a linear fashion and turns back, like a yo-yo travelling along the breadth of all time
    – borktroll
    Commented Sep 6, 2017 at 15:10
  • I think this might just be how i conceptualized it. time travel is wibbly
    – borktroll
    Commented Sep 6, 2017 at 15:18
  • 1
    I have this one on the shelf at home. Will be able to answer after my night class (hours and hours from now) if no one gets to it faster. Commented Sep 6, 2017 at 20:18

1 Answer 1

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The story is Robert Silverberg's 1972 novelette '{Now + n Now - n}'1 (also on majipoor.com) a winner of the 1973 Locust and heavily anthologized.

The description on majipoor reads

A man with the telepathic ability to communicate with himself through time uses his power to play the stock market. Everything goes fine until a woman with a power of her own shows up. The title of this story is printed differently in every publication where I've seen it. Sometimes it's in brackets, sometimes not. In the story, plain parentheses are used.

and the story opens

All had been so simple, so elegant so profitable for ourselves. And then we met the lovely Selene and nearly were undone. She came into our live during our regular transmission hour on Wednesday, October 7, 1987, between six and seven P.M. Central European Time. The moneymaking hour. I was in satisfactory contact with myself and also with myself [...]

It's available in audio form on Escape Pod.


1 In Beyond the Safe Zone (a collection of the author's work) the title is typeset as math with the two phases stacked between the brackets. In LaTeX I would duplicate it as $$\left\{ \begin{array}{c} \text{Now} + n \\ \text{Now} - n \end{array}\right\}$$.

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