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I read this short story when I was a teenager. I had thought it was Asimov, but can't find reference to it. I would like to know the author and name of story if anyone knows for my own teenage son. The story line as best as I can remember:

The story starts in the future where people are assigned roles based on accurate tests which are rarely wrong. A bank clerk who experiences worsening headaches one day has a mind explosion and he is instantly much higher intelligence and re-tests far above his prior job which is unheard of. I think this happens a couple of times and he becomes clairvoyant and somehow travels to the future where he learns that he was experimented on and a future criminal had put a stolen experimental 'Super-brain x' in his head. He meets the highly intelligent future humans but has become more intelligent than them and becomes telekinetic also and starts being able to control matter at an atomic level. He realizes that a catastrophic event stemming from a published journal in the past would destroy the world. He travels back to the past to stop a guy from publishing the incriminating paper. Due to a series of events he is forced to fuse his own body with that of the writer and throw their bodies into a furnace. In the future an examiner questions the validity of naming the original time traveler who gifted the brain as a criminal and surmises it was fortunate he acted as he did.

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  • Hi, welcome to the site. In roughly which year did you read this story? Also, did you read it in an anthology, a magazine, or online? Commented Feb 19, 2022 at 10:40
  • possibly the same as scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/179219/…
    – Otis
    Commented Feb 20, 2022 at 14:01
  • @Bluebear - If anyone correctly identifies the story you're looking for, please mark that answer as accepted by clicking on the check mark beneath the voting buttons. Or if the only answers posted are incorrect, please indicate that with a comment so we know to keep looking. Thanks. Commented Feb 20, 2022 at 14:16

1 Answer 1

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Sounds like One Against Time (1969) by Astron del Martia.

From Goodreads:

Harold Newman was a loser. He was a plodding bank clerk whose past was weary and whose future was dull. Until the moment when his mind was activated by a warp in time and he became a super brain - a brilliant freak gifted with the power of twenty computers. Suddenly Harold's future wasn't dull anymore. It was deadly.

From a reader review:

One thing that stayed with me is the idea that the chap was so intelligent he could control individual atoms in his body, making him capable of walking through walls by arranging his atoms among those of the wall. I lay in bed dreaming about swimming through concrete.

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  • Duplicate of Question "Scifi book about brain implant stolen from the future, and implanted in an unsuspecting normal guy."
    – KenM
    Commented Feb 19, 2022 at 17:13

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