They tried to think what might be causing it. Birds? They went up on the roof and looked at the horn-shaped antenna. Sure enough, pigeons were nesting inside it, leaving droppings that might be causing the problem.

They evicted the pigeons, cleaned the antenna, and sealed every possible joint and crack (probably with duct tape). There was still background noise.

All right. So what else could it be? Streams of electrons from nuclear testing? If it was, the noise should be diminishing, since atomic tests had been banned in 1963. They ran dozens of tests on the intensity to see if it was. It wasn’t.

And it seemed to be the same no matter which part of the heavens were overhead, which made no sense at all.

They tested and retested, taped and retaped, scraped off pigeon droppings, and despaired of ever getting to the point where they could perform their experiment on radio signal intensity for nearly five years before they realized what they had wasn’t background noise at all. It was microwaves, the resounding echo of the Big Bang.

Friday Flip brought the new funding application. It was sixty-eight pages long and poorly stapled. Three pages fell out of it as Flip slouched in the door and two more as she handed it to me. “Thank you, Flip,” I said, and smiled at her.

The night before I had read the last two thirds of Pippa Passes, during which Pippa had talked two murderously adulterous lovers into killing themselves, convinced a deceived young student to choose love over revenge, and reformed assorted ne’er-do-wells. And all just by chirping, “The year’s at the spring,/And day’s at the morn.” Think what she could have accomplished if she’d had a library card.

“You can change the world,” Browning was clearly saying. “By being perky and signaling before turning left, one person can have a positive effect on society,” and it was obvious from “The Pied Piper” that he understood how trends worked.