Cooltown University existed to defy all expectations as it was neither particularly cool, nor did it reside in a town of any sort.

History experts disagreed on the genesis of its name. Some thought it was a garbled up version of “coal town”, which made phonetic but not logical sense, since there were never any “coal towns” in a five hundred mile radius of the campus. Others believed it was a reference to some atmospheric anomaly which, indeed, would be quite cool, except there were no naturally occurring atmospheric anomalies on campus.

(Unless you counted that one time when the students made it rain in the physics department, presumably by accident.)

The reality was much simpler. The university was initially named after its founder, Francis Coleton, and changed two years later during state registration when someone misspelled it.

Presumably by accident.

Cooltown resided in a geographically magical spot which was somehow equidistant in all directions from any significant human dwelling. It wasn’t known who had built it there; as far as the locals were considered, it randomly spawned into existence in 1923, and forever remained in obscurity, overshadowed by all other universities in the state.

Its original department was the department of English literature, followed promptly by the department of philosophy and ethics. It then began to accumulate funds and soon spilled over and spread out like a well-fed amoeba, eventually creating a whole academic buffet.

Students of Cooltown could not boast a prestigious diploma, but adored their campus to the extent that few went home even for summer holidays. Every department had its Thing. Department of physics and applied maths had the best coffee, department of chemistry had the best food, and department of philosophy and ethics had the best place to smoke.

It wasn’t clear why everyone had collectively decided that the department of philosophy and ethics had the best place to smoke; perhaps it was the presence of several large engraved signs announcing that smoking was prohibited everywhere on the campus premises. Students of philosophy and ethics loved to discuss the philosophical and ethical implications of such restrictions, typically while smoking.

Dirk had arrived on Cooltown campus on 9:25 AM on a Saturday. Todd and Farah were picked up by Kevin’s personal drivers, and Dirk was allowed to take the car. Dirk was rarely allowed to take the car - which was technically Farah’s - since he did not believe in any fundamental differences between driving a real car and mariokart.

He was also banned from using the office popcorn machine unassisted, for complicated reasons.

Cooltown greeted Dirk with one of the pleasant weather configurations from its running catalog of weathers. The sun glazed the ground and sent sunbeams dancing on his skin, and the soft breeze brought the faint scent of blooming lilacs. He strolled across campus, not in a rush to get to professor Daly’s office. The man was expecting him by ten.

On his way to the department of physics and applied math Dirk had encountered several note-worthy sights. One of them was a pack of cats walking in an organized line behind the department of engineering. He considered investigating it further, but realized that it might take more than half hour. His grasp on the linear progression of time was slight and unreliable, and he preferred to aim for arriving much early, which allowed him to arrive only a few minutes late.

*

Alas, there was no mystery there to investigate. The cats were there because Lilly was there, and Lilly brought food. Always. Every day at 10 AM and 3PM exactly on the dot. And Lilly’s determination to enforce fair and equal food shares among the cats was such, that she single-handedly disproved all current theories of feline behaviour and had actually convinced cats to form orderly queues for food, which they were now in the process of doing.

*

Professor’s Daly office was just over a turn on the second floor, but he insisted on meeting Dirk in the lobby and walking him there personally. The internal structure of the institutes’s building was countlessly modified by its inhabitants, and, by virtue of its inhabitants being adept at utterly inhuman concepts such as Lobachevsky’s geometry and non-Euclidean planes, the structure had refused to make any sense at all.

Employees navigated it with ease. All students who still hadn’t learned to navigate it by second semester of their freshmen year would inevitably drop out, as this would demonstrate an inherent incompatibility of their brain with the kinds of ridiculous things people taught and researched there.

“And now to the left,” Professor Daly instructed, and opened the door for Dirk. “Like I’ve said, a bit hard to explain.”

Dirk had zoned out for the entirety of the walk, having been distracted by the slightly hypnotic pattern of floor tiles, so he appreciated the help.

“Please come in,” Professor invited, already taking a seat.

Professor’s Daly on-campus office was much tidier than his at-home office, but what it gained in organization, it lacked in free space. You could hardly walk in there at all; the best you could go for is a slow waddle, and in some places only a cautious squeeze in between bookcases would suffice.

This has not stopped Dirk from skillfully surfing the tight maze of abandoned blackboards and book stacks in order to arrive at the other end of the professor’s desk.

“Well this is nice.” Dirk nodded. “Not as nice as my office but, you know, nice.” He smiled broadly, nodding some more for good measure. “So why are we here again instead of the place where you last saw the music box?”

“Oh I’ve searched my apartment left right and center!” Professor Daly explained. “Not a dust spec there that I haven’t turned upside down. And my neighbor, Janice, helped too, thoroughly helped, we had tea twice, so I reckoned next best place to look is here.”

“Good thinking, professor!” Dirk exclaimed, jumping up from his seat as if an eel had just been teleported from the depths of the ocean right into the chair for the sole purpose of biting his ass. “I’ll start right away. You keep talking.”

And he launched himself at the nearest cabinet from which he began to remove all objects one by one, stacking them on the coffee table behind him.

“Talk, you ask?” professor repeated. “Talk about what?”

“Whatever suits you.” Dirk shrugged, struggling with a stuck tome of electrochemical analysis manual. “I find that when people talk in my presence, regardless of the subject, they tend to mention things that I require to solve the case. Don’t ask me how I know which things because I don’t. Know,” he explained. “It simply happens.”

“Very well,” professor agreed, and waited for himself to start talking.

“What you told me yesterday, over the phone, about Arthur’s disappearance,” Dirk prompted. “You said it was never investigated properly. Do you have any idea why?”

“Oh, sadly, I do.” Professor sighed. “See, he wasn’t young, Arthur. Neither am I, then or now.” He chuckled. “We were always complaining to each other, about getting old. And the last few months, Arthur, well, he seemed worse than usual. It was subtle, the students didn’t notice. I did. And then, last day he came to work, told me he was going to visit his family…” professor sighed again. “It’s like I knew he wasn’t coming back. I helped him pack, we had coffee together. I left. Didn’t even drive him to the train station next day.”

There was a pause, which would have been spent in profound silence if it wasn’t for Dirk trying (and failing) to stack and balance several mugs on top of each other.

“Do continue,” he urged, while catching the mugs mid-flight and plopping them back onto the table’s surface.

“Next, Arthur left,” professor said, “and didn’t return my calls, or emails, or anything of the sort. I called the police. They looked into it, then suddenly dropped the case. I demanded to know why, but only got the answer a month later, and not from the police.”

He paused again, and rubbed his wrinkled forehead, and in the faint sunlight breaching through the curtained window, he suddenly looked quite his age.

“I knew he had family, see. A sister and a nephew, down south. Knew he didn’t get along with them much either, never met them, never even saw any photos of them in his room. They didn’t like me, too, I think,” he added. “Or didn’t like how close I was with Arthur. Thought we were a couple, I bet. Thought that was a sin or some such.”

“Were you?” Dirk asked nonchalantly while rummaging through some cardboard boxes in the corner. “A couple, I mean?”

“No-no.” Professor shook his head, smiling. “Not at all. Not that there’s any things wrong with that though, quite. Quite the opposite,” he assured Dirk.

Professor Daly could not keep up with all the new flags that kids these days would come up with, so he had assumed that the coloured stripes on the side of Dirk’s black leather jacket meant that he was queer. Incidentally, professor was right about Dirk being queer. But it had nothing to do with the coloured stripes.

“You were just friends then,” Dirk suggested.

“There was nothing ‘just’ about our friendship, my dear fella,” professor replied. “Arthur and I, well.” He considered whether to elaborate on that for a moment, then decided that the coloured stripes also meant that he could. “I was never quite like other people, see. Never got married, never dated anyone. Never wanted to date, or any such thing, anything close. I didn’t have a wife, but I had Arthur. We’ve known each other fifty years, lived together, on and off, for forty of those. Went through everything together. He was my person, Arthur. He was everything.”

Another pause, this time silent at last, descended onto the room. Dirk sat on the floor, surrounded by piles and boxes and hoards of things, lost in thoughts. Expressing sympathy was hard; but he sure felt it twofold.

“What happened?” Dirk asked, softly.

“A month after he left,” professor spoke again, “I got a letter in the mail, from Arthur’s sister. Said he passed away at their place. Said they wanted nothing to do with me, didn’t want me at his funeral. I had no ways of testing that, but I couldn’t exactly go tracking them down, demanding to know everything… To this day, I still don’t know where he’s buried. I just bring flowers to his memorial at this institute. Every year.”

Professor Daly had nothing more to say. His head dropped slightly, eyes fixated on the dusty floor, and his hands rubbed the edges of his armchair. He only looked up when he realized that Dirk was standing by his side.

“Professor…” Dirk began. “Roger, may I call you Roger?” The man nodded, and Dirk dragged a chair closer to take a seat. “I am very sorry,” Dirk said. “I cannot bring Arthur back, but I promise that I will do everything in my power to find this music box of yours.”

He smiled gingerly at the professor, and the professor smiled warmly back.

The tender moment was interrupted by a knock on the door, followed by the opening of said door with enough force to send it slamming against the wall with a strangely metallic jingle.

“Hey, Roger!” a high-pitched, melodic voice announced. “Do you have like a tall hat of some sort? Oh. You didn’t tell me you were expecting guests.”

On the threshold of professor Daly’s office stood a tall, lanky, round-cheeked girl of not older than twenty. On her she had a pair of buggy jeans and an over-sized sweater, both of which had faint grease and dirt stains. She also had a heavy-looking batch of keys hanging down from her neck on a string.

“Good morning to you too, Lilly,” Roger said. “I don’t have hats of any sort.”

“Pity,” she responded. “Mathys club’s on and Donna is doing magic tricks. Guess she’ll have to do with one of my buckets.”

Lilly’s official job title was “cleaner lady”, but in effect she did everything from helping professors with powerpoint projectors to making sure that every classroom had enough chalk. She also had a knack for fixing things, which started from her repairing the lounge room coffee machine and ended with people bringing their gadgets and kitchen appliances for Lilly to look at.

People joked that Lilly was the department’s guardian spirit. One time when she was sick with the flu for two weeks, the institute had descended into such utter chaos that the university’s dean had to come over and take a look. The dean didn’t fix one thing, however. But Lilly did, as soon as she came back.

“Do you like magic tricks?” Dirk asked instead of a hello or an introduction, and proceeded to conjure several wrapped candies from his own left ear.

Unfortunately, Dirk was not very good at magic tricks, so the candies also fell in abundance from the sleeve of his leather jacket.

“I don’t.” Lilly grinned from ear to ear. “Magic tricks fail to meaningfully address the neurological presuppositions of the very same phenomenon they rely upon,” she added with the same broad smile. I’m Lilly,” she then said, approaching Dirk and extending a smudge-covered palm. “I work here.”

“Dirk Gently,” he responded, shaking her hand with enthusiasm. “Holistic detective.”

“Would you two like some tea or coffee?” Roger offered, already getting up and opening the cupboard on his right. “I know you’re both busy but it will only take a jiffy. I was going to tell you more about Arthur.”

“Oh.” Lilly’s smile disappeared. “I, uh, I have a sinister puddle to mop up on floor three. Sorry. Catch up later though, yeah? I need help with the crossword from Friday.”

“Send me a text when you’ll be free,” Roger replied. “I might not be here.”

“Sure.” She nodded. “Toddles!” And left.

“She seemed…” Strange, Dirk wanted to say, but realized how that would sound coming from him of all people, and said ‘nice’ instead. “Is she your friend?”

“Just a friend, yes,” Roger replied. “Tea or coffee then?”

Tea was brewed and tea was enjoyed, and Dirk sat across from Roger, listening to stories of Arthur’s long and fascinating life. He learned about their camping trips, and Arthur’s tinkering successes, and about all the insane and, occasionally, near lethal laboratory accidents. By Saturday noon, Dirk felt like he had known Arthur too.

“Gracious me!” Roger exclaimed, glancing at his wrist watch. “I have student hours at half past. Twenty years I’ve had the same hours and I keep forgetting.”

“Should I wait for you?” Dirk asked.

“If you can, yes.” He hurried to make at least an approximate attempt at tidying up the place. “We can go back to searching after.”

“Oh, one last thing,” Dirk said, raising his arm like a diligent student, “I saw some cats on my way to the institute. Do you know of any cats acting strangely around here?”

“Is it important?” professor Daly asked, still not entirely accustomed to Dirk’s methods.

Dirk nodded with a slight corner-of-the-lips smile.

“There are cats.” Professor shrugged. “One of them, a black, fluffy fella, friendly, used to come to my lecture hall a lot, but I’m afraid I’ve violated its trust. Used one too many in a demonstration of Schroedinger’s superposition experiment. Without the actual poison, of course. Now I use a toy cat instead.”

“Nothing strange then?” Dirk repeated.

“Well how would I know.” Professor chuckled. “Isn’t it a common cat trait, to act in a strange ways?”

Dirk could not find it in himself to disagree.