Two days later, I made one of my rare visits to the upper office and took myself over to Warren Whatmore desk, proffering a green document.
 “Here it is.”
    Warren Whatmore eyed me with cold anger. He snatched the proposal form and leaned toward me menacingly.
 “If you ever say anything about this, I’ll have you fired.”
    I shrank back off to my dungeon, and indeed never did say anything to anyone about Mrs Hamilton’s proposal, but then no one ever asked me about it so it wasn’t a problem. I was pleased about that. It wasn’t all that common for my problems to just simply go away, as if they never existed.

“You hear the words inside your head?” he asked.
“Well, not exactly ‘hear’, and not exactly ‘see’,” I told him. “There are—well, sort of shapes—and if you use words you can make them clearer so they’re easier to understand.”
“But you don’t have to use words—not say them aloud like you were doing just now?”
“Oh no—it just helps to make it clearer sometimes.”
“It also helps to make things a lot more dangerous, for both of you. I want you to make me a promise that you’ll never do it out loud any more.”
“All right, Uncle Alex,” I agreed again.
“You’ll understand when you’re older how important it is,” he told me, and went on to insist that I should get Rosalind to make the same promises. I did not tell him anything about the others because he seemed so worried already, but I decided to get them to promise too.
  In some distant future, kids are born with the power to communicate by thought transmission over great distances in John Wyndham’s third book The Chrysalids. They only gradually become aware of their powers and that there are great numbers of them and they are regarded as freaks by the old-style humans and marked for elimination. But Darwin’s laws have other ideas. A book about what might happen if a new superior type of human began to evolve.
  It turned out that I was not the only one who found John Wyndham mysterious. When he published The Day of the Triffids in 1954, everyone thought him a new author but in fact he’d been publishing stories regularly since 1931 under variations of his own name. He was really John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, and he mixed and matched those names in six different psuedonyms before he finally settled on John Wyndham. I’d read several books by John Harris and John Benyon without realising who he really was. He was probably a little confused by then himself.