That afternoon Nillian travels into the city. His coach stops in front of a small alleyway, with two large buildings on either side. Nillian steps out and motions the driver to stay with the carriage. He dons his leather gloves and walks into the alleyway. The alleyway is dark, but not too dark to see his way. It is relatively clean, with only two garbage cans and a sleeping cat. The alleyway leads to a small cobblestone courtyard. The courtyard is at the moment housing several bikes, and two small children are playing a game of tic-tac-toe. In one corner of the courtyard a small apple tree has taken root. It doesn't look too healthy, but Nillian can see two small red apples hanging from the branches.
Surrounding the courtyard is a large house, which is divided up into apartments. In the middle section the building houses a small office for the caretaker. Behind the office Nillian sees two stairs leading up, one going right and the other going left. The houses look a little bit old, but the houses are well kept and not rundown or anything.
Nillian makes his way to the caretaker’s office, and learns that James Thomp lives on the third floor, right hand side. He takes the stairs and knocks politely on the door. It is opened after a few minutes by a small woman, wearing a dress with a flower motif.
"Yes?" she asks in a soft voice.
"Hello, I am Nillian Luckett from the University. I was wondering if Sir Thomp was in and available?"
"I will see if he is taking visitors at the moment, I'll be right back."
The woman goes back into the apartment, leaving the door open. After a few minutes she returns, smiling, and beckons Nillian inside.
"James would love to make your acquaintance, sir. Please come in. Can I take your jacket?"
Nillian silently let her take his jacket and gloves, and follows her inside to a small living room.
After a minute an old man comes in, leaning heavily on his stick. The man is wearing a green suit with a few ink stains on the sleeves. His hair was almost gone, just leaving a few tuffs of white hair. He has tick burly eyebrows and a slightly confused look on his face. But when he sees Nillian standing he smiles and walks over to greet him.
"Welcome, sir Luckett! What a pleasure. Please, take a seat, and tell me what brings you all the way out here."
"Thank you sir. The reason I am here is because your name was mentioned to me by the council of the University. You see, I am at the moment working on a book describing the history of Dr Biene, and they told me that you also did a lot of research on him."
At the mention of Dr. Biene James’s face lights up and be begins nodding.
"Yes indeed! I did a lot of research on him, after I finished my last book. Never did publish though, just never got round to it. I think I might have most of my notes still on file, let me check."
He gets up and walks of to the other room. A few minutes later he returns with a large stack of papers.
"Found it! These are notes and such that I uncovered when doing my research. I recon you probably have already discovered most of it, but perhaps you will find something new."
He hands the papers to Nillian, who immediately begins to leaf through them. After a minute he looks up, and asks James about the notebooks.
"Ah, you found the reference too, have you? I spent many weeks searching for those notebooks, but never found any trace of them. It might be that the rumours are true, and that they were destroyed in the Great Bang. But I don't think so. Even in that time people would have noticed Dr. Biene being there, and there was never any mention of him made by the survivors."
"So what do you think that happened?"
"Well, I think that something else happened. In one of the old fragments in the Library I managed to find some personal papers of Dr. Biene. They mentioned a ... well, goal of some kind. He mentioned going out to explore, looking for something. I think that he went into the city to build his own laboratory, so he could work in peace."
"Why would he want to do that? He had all the equipment he needed at the University?"
"Yes, but the University started interfering with his work. They wanted him to design certain machines for the city and such, while he wanted to work on new things, things described in his notebooks. So I can image that he wanted his own place, and work for himself. But I scoured the whole city, looking at blueprints and building sites of that time. I never found anything that even came close to a secret laboratory."
It is silent for a minute as Nillian thinks it over, disturbed by the new information. Then he suddenly gets an idea.
"Or the mention about exploring was about something else. What if ... he wanted to travel? Explore the rest of Kataria(*), see the other cities and such? If what you say is true he might even have sneaked out to avoid the University from preventing him leaving. That would explain why he disappeared without a trace. And if he befell some kind of accident along the way that would explain why he was never seen again."
James' eyes widen as he thinks it over. Then he jumps up, and searches through the papers he just gave to Nillian.
"It fits! One of Dr. Biene's assistants also disappeared. She was present at the experiments that caused the Big Bang, and it was thought that she died in the explosion. But there were some strange rumours that she was sighted a week after, in Räan. So it is possible that she was there accompanying Dr. Biene."
"That's great news! That means that perhaps I will be able to find something in Räan that will give some insight in what happened to Dr. Biene. Thank you very much, Dr. Thomp."
"Oh, you are welcome sir Luckett. It was the least I could do. I wish I thought of it myself, then it would have been me that would have investigated" he adds with a laugh.
"I wish you good luck in Räan, young sir. I hope you will find something worthwhile there."
Nillian thanks James again and takes his leave of him. Clutching the papers that James gave him he carefully walks outside and returns to his carriage, which takes his home.
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