"Ah," Ford says, waving a hand. "Barge became a chaos labyrinth. Nightmares turned real. The West Coast of the United States will probably never be the same. You know. The kind of thing that happens when you mix magic and science and dimension-warping technology.

"I built in protections so that nobody died or was physically hurt. But some of them were frightened pretty badly, and I had no right to put them through that."

He pauses, his feelings about this complicated.

"Still, it feels sometimes like most people on the Barge would rather work under a dishonest Admiral and ignore the inmates who hate it here than have anyone disrupt their plans."

Ford's accepted this, but he doesn't like it.