That wasn't exactly how Ford would have described it, but it sounded like precisely the way Dodonus would have related the story. This pleased him, because it was a sign that at least Tycho had said something about him, and the detailed being muddled might just as well have occurred in Dodonus' telling as in Broadmoor's remembering of the story. It was reaffirming to hear that he'd come up in conversation on at least one occasion, particularly since Ford couldn't recall Broadmoor ever having done so. Then again, if Tycho had talked about him in general terms and not assigned him a specific name, Ford probably wouldn't have taken much notice. He could have been talking about my poet friend or something like that every time they met and Ford wouldn't have thought twice about it. He was only so conscious of it now because he'd stumbled across the fact that Broadmoor sometimes slept here with no context with which to make sense of it.

"That's right. He also likes to say I put Williams out of a job," Ford said with a half-smile. He still didn't know that he was very keen on Broadmoor being here, but he could put on a passable facade of friendliness (hopefully, anyway; he hadn't ever had the best of poker faces). "But I don't really think that's possible when he wasn't paying him in the first place."

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