Gather close, oh ye hesitant souls; I have a story to tell.

Once upon a time, long long ago, a dignitary came to visit.

In the place that dignitary came from, he was reckoned by some to have small power, by others a placeholder. There were even those who whispered behind their hands of old treacheries.

These were ignored, those few poor souls seen as chasing vapor trails. Whatever kernel of truth formed their conspiracy theories, however, to this story they are of no moment.

So the dignitary came to visit, there at a university in the middle of a city.

The university itself held small fame in certain scholarly corners. Mostly, it was a place where people who had to work for a living could manage to scrap together a degree, in between shifts.

It was the way of things at the university, at that time, that the centerpiece, in artistic terms, of the university campus was a fountain. A magnificent edifice, with one unfortunate flaw.

It didn't work. Not in living memory, which on a university means no undergraduate or graduate student yet walking those almost-hallowed halls, had water been pumped successfully, through arcs and sprays to reverberate across the almost two acre showpiece. The students rather enjoyed this.

Apparently, the university powers-that-be didn't share this ironic joy. The thought of the dignitary visiting, walking by an empty concrete pond, was too much. This couldn't stand.

One hundred thousand dollars was requisitioned. The fountain was repaired.

Temporarily. The fix wasn't permanent.

A fact known, publicly, as soon as the money was devoted. This slightly ridiculous state of affairs wasn't hidden. It wasn't pushed into the background.

It was the headline of the university paper in the very first article written on the subject.

Now, there are students for whom such a state of affairs wouldn't have merited anything more than a raised eyebrow.

There were very few of these dedicated scholars, these higher souls, at the university. Working-class kids all, they had a certain element among them.

There was no need to vocalize the discontent.

They didn't target the dignitary's trip. Not quite. They targeted the week before, while there was still time to fix what they had done.

Rumors abound. I'd imagine that, if one were so inclined as to go to a certain wholesale warehouse just down the freeway, pull out records, then a pallet of a certain well-known brand of powdered laundry soap would be quite readily found among the sales on that time and date.

Hard to say, though, since there were only acres of suds to be seen, that Monday morning when all the self-congratulatory administrators walked into their offices, opened their blinds.

And beheld what they had, ah, wrought.

Could be worse.

There's another rumor, you see. One that your humble correspondent hesitates to report. Since this rumor was one that circulated among the members of only one very small group of chemistry students.

That rumor, you see, suggested that, if one were to go into a certain lab, at a certain time of night, one could, without too much trouble, find a minor supply, merely grams... of cesium.

One likes to think that this particular dignitary would have gotten the joke, that this august personage would have recognized the ridiculousness of spending such an outrageous sum on a temporary fix, to be run for only a few hours and then shut down promptly after the visit.

Well, the suds, anyway. Even the progenitor of the cesium possibility had to admit, given sufficient time and space for meditation, that such a step might have been going just a bit too far.