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That Thing With Bob and the Crop Circles

by T. Kingfisher

So last Tuesday, long about noon, I found myself down at the hardware store to buy chicken feed for the ladies.

I never gave much thought to keeping chickens, I must admit, but my niece Donna said I needed something to give me structure now that I’m retired. I had figured that going to the coffee shop every morning and reading up on my journals counted as structure, but apparently it does not, according to Donna. She came over in her little Subaru and set up a chicken coop and put three prime specimens of Gallus gallus domesticus in it for me.

Two of them are hens and one of them is a rooster who believes very firmly that it’s a hen, and since I respect everybody’s right to go through life in the way that suits them best, I call them all the ladies. And I have to admit that keeping chickens is soothing, whether or not you’re retired, since they make very nice little burble-burble-cluck noises and there isn’t a lot of angst to a chicken. Too many animals around now who are full-up on angst, if you ask me, which I blame on domestication gone a little bit too far. I met a dog the other day that was part Basset Hound and part Chihuahua and one look in that dog’s eyes was enough to make you reconsider a lot of life choices.

But anyway, there I was at the hardware store, where Marlene works. Marlene’s a good woman and she runs that place with military precision, by which I mean that everything costs five times more than it should and nobody knows where anything is. Still, I like to shop local, so I went in and bought some feed for the ladies and then we stood around and talked about the weather.

I do not know why people get so bent out of shape about talking about the weather, as if it’s beneath them. A really good conversation about the weather can go upwards of an hour and meander widely. We had just touched on the year with the Halloween blizzard and followed it up with the Christmas it was ninety-five degrees, when who comes into the store but Bob.

You remember Bob, of course—Marlene’s boy, not the Reverend. I couldn’t exactly say that Bob was a friend of mine, especially since I relieved him of an ill-gotten narwhal he was keeping in his aboveground swimming pool, but we stay pleasant (if distinctly chilly on Bob’s part) because he’s Marlene’s boy, although Marlene herself has often expressed the opinion that she took a few too many herbal supplements during pregnancy. I asked her once if she meant marijuana and she said no, she never touched the stuff, but she had gone through a dark patch in her life when she was hooked on goldenseal and brewer’s yeast, so take that as you will.

Bob stormed in and it was pretty obvious he was in a mood. He slapped the counter and said, “Mom, give me the strongest stuff you got for crop circles.”

“Crop circles?” said Marlene.

“I got ‘em all over the yard,” he said. Then he noticed that I was there and said, “Doc,” with a little more politeness than he normally would, on account of his mother being there.

“Good morning, Bob,” I said. “How’ve you been keeping?”

“You’d know,” he said, “if you bothered to follow me on Facebook.”

“Do not start down that road again,” I said. “The last time I visited your page, you had linked an article by some fella who claimed that there is an international female smuggling ring stealing men’s semen, and that is not a thing I wish to have inflicted upon me before I have had adequate coffee.”

“It’s true though, Doc,” he said, and I could see the fire starting up in his eye. Bob never met a conspiracy theory he did not embrace like a long-lost friend.

“Ha!” said Marlene, before I could say anything. “Ain’t nobody out there stealing semen, hon. There’s always way too much of it around, if you ask me, and as the former mother of a teenage boy, I am something of an authority on the matter.”

Now this was certainly accurate but no one likes to think that their mother remembers their adolescent indiscretions. Bob turned a little bit green, probably thinking about the ghost of unmentionable things past, so I jumped in to try and steer the conversation back to less regrettable waters. “Now what’s all this about crop circles?”

“Oh, they’re everywhere,” he said. “Never seen anything like it.”

“But Bob,” I said, “crop circles are not a phenomenon that you usually find around here, and when you do, it is almost always a couple of people with a board and a rope and a distinct lack of acceptable creative outlets. And also, though it pains me to mention it, you do not have crops.”

“Oh yeah?” said Bob. “Well, take a look at this!” He shoved his phone at me and I peered at the first picture in the album, which was a flattened circle of dead yellow grass. Scale was kinda hard to make out, but there were two little round pock marks on one side, about two feet apart.

“Well,” I said, after I looked at it for a minute, “I believe this is where you had your old aboveground swimming pool, and those bits are where the legs on the ladder used to be.”

“It’s the next one,” Bob said.

I scrolled over and the photo was of something yellow and crusty on the ground. “That’s Fuligo septica. Dog vomit slime mold.”

Bob glared at me and snatched the phone back. “I’ve got that crap everywhere too,” he grumbled, then flipped through a few photos before he showed me another one.

And I gotta tell you, it sure looked like a crop circle. It was in the lawn, which hadn’t been mowed for a while, so while it wasn’t quite as sharp as a cornfield, it was still pretty clear. There were three big concentric circles with seven little circles evenly spaced along the outer two, and then the inmost circle had a pattern of overlapping curves like a lace doily. It put me in mind of something, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what.

“Huh,” I said. “That is a crop circle, all right. I’m sorry I doubted you, Bob.”

He huffed a little, but I could tell he was pleased I’d apologized. Bob’s usually in the position of being the apologizer, not the apologizee. “There’s more,” he said, scrolling on his phone. “That’s just the big one.”

I looked at the other photos, and sure enough, there was…something. I don’t know if I’d call ‘em crop circles the same way. They had a single big circle full of a kind of snaky pattern, and then some little ovals outside the circle. “Got a couple more like that,” he said, glancing over my shoulder. And he did. One had a line linking the little ovals to the snaky circle, and one had a big circle around all three of the smaller ones, but they were all variations on a theme.

I scratched my head. “Never saw a crop circle like that,” I said. It made my brain itchy, whatever it was. Had a sense that there was some kind pattern, if I could just figure it out.

I took my bag of chicken feed and waved to Bob and Marlene and went out, trying to figure out where I’d seen those shapes before, and why they seemed so dang familiar.

Now this’d be a better story if I had some kind of dream that explained everything, like the fellow who dreamed about snakes grabbing each other’s tails and woke up knowing how benzene worked. But my dreams are always the kinda nonsensical stuff where I’ve got to teach a class and I get there and it’s supposed to be French or Economics or one of those other classes I can’t even fake my way through, and I only have slides for the evolutionary biology of zebra mussels but there’s no slide projector and also I’m not wearing pants. So I didn’t dream about Bob’s crop circles at all.

No, what actually happened was that I was at the coffee shop, reading up on journals and looking at pictures of a momma dog who had adopted six little baby ducks and one of those ads came on where the doctor says that one weird trick will help you lose weight and while I was clicking trying to get the damn window to close, I hit another ad for fertilizer, and it had atoms of nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium all animated and going into a plant’s roots and I nearly dropped my coffee cup, because Bob’s big crop circle was none other than a nitrogen atom, only ten feet across and made out of crabgrass.

I thought about sending him a message on Facebook, but that would have involved having to look at his page and he was probably still riding the theory about an international semen smuggling ring to force men to pay child support and that seemed like a lot at that hour of the day. So instead I got my next coffee cup to go and went out and hopped in my truck and drove over to Bob’s house.

He was sitting on the porch, glaring at the grass when I pulled up. “Doc?” he said. “Something I can do for you?”

“I figure out your crop circle,” I said.

“Crop circle!” he said. “Ha! Least of my problems now.”

“What?” I looked around the lawn, which had a fine crop of dog vomit slime molds going, but otherwise looked like any old ratty lawn that happened to have crop circles in it.

“Got a gas leak,” he said. He waved a roll of duct tape at me.

“Shit. You called the company?”

“They’re useless. I got the duct tape, I’ll fix it myself.”

“Bob,” I said, “the workings of natural gas are not a place for the amateur enthusiast, no matter how much duct tape he is using. I am afraid that you will turn yourself and your trailer into a fine dust and scatter them both all over the landscape.”

“It ain’t in the trailer,” he said. “Come take a look.”

He got off the porch and waved me over, and if I had the sense that the good lord gave a rutabaga, I would have driven away, but I was afraid that turning the ignition was gonna ignite any gas in the area, so I was effectively trapped. I got out of the car.

Bob pointed me to one of the big dead circles. I sniffed. I didn’t smell anything.

“It doesn’t smell,” said Bob, only he said it about two octaves higher than normal.

“What?” I said, and damned if I didn’t sound like a Chipmunk Christmas album myself.

“Right around here,” squeaked Bob. “It’s comin’ up from this spot.”

“Bob,” I squeaked, and then I stepped back out of the circle and coughed a few times, because the effects of prolonged loss of oxygen to the human brain aren’t great, even if in Bob’s case, we might not notice for a little while. “Bob,” I said, sounding like myself again, “this is not a gas leak. This is helium. You have helium coming up out of the ground on your property, which is either an incredible stroke of financial luck or a sign that somebody got something very wrong in the pipes.”

“Go back to the bit about financial luck,” squeaked Bob.

“Not until you stop squeaking. Your mother is a good woman, even if she overcharges for chicken feed, and I do not wish to be explaining to her how I let you die of oxygen deprivation while standing in front of me.”

“Die?” squeaked Bob. “It’s just helium, I ain’t gonna die.”

“Bob,” I said, “if you are breathing in helium, you are not breathing in oxygen. You are currently suffocating as we are standing here talking about it, and I do not wish to drag your unconscious body out of that crop circle. I am retired.”

“You said this one wasn’t a crop circle, though.”

I started to defend myself, but then it occurred to me that Bob was obstinate enough to stand there and argue the point while his brain cells expired one by one, and since I have always felt a certain pity for Bob’s brain cells, I am afraid I lied and said, “Also prolonged exposure to helium can cause erectile dysfunction,” whereupon he damn near teleported out of danger.

I paced a circle of my own around the helium area and realized that Bob had been right, which made twice in a week, a personal best. This wasn’t a crop circle, this was the spot where the aboveground swimming pool had stood. I could see the two little circles where the ladder feet had been.

Two little circles and a great big circle…and a diagram of a nitrogen atom nearby…

“Eureka!” I cried, and Bob said, “Where?” and I was so excited that I didn’t bother explaining to him about Archimedes and the bathtub.

“Bob,” I said, “this isn’t a crop circle, it’s a helium atom!”

“Eh?”

“A big nucleus full of protons and two little electrons on the outside! And now there’s helium coming out of it!”

Bob scratched the back of his neck and said, “Right, Doc, okay.”

I went over to the big crop circle that I’d realized was a nitrogen atom, and wished I had some way to test for nitrogen in the air. Except that once I’d looked at it for a bit, I realized that this wasn’t actually a nitrogen atom by itself, it was more complicated than that. The nitrogen atom had four little crop circles coming off it, which each had one little electron circle, although one was funny shaped, and the funny shaped one was linked up to another big nitrogen atom, which had two more crop circles coming off it, and those were absolutely lousy with electrons and—

“Holy Mother of God,” I said, “it’s ammonium nitrate.”

“Run this by me again, Doc,” said Bob, loading another sack of Marlene’s best fertilizer into the back of my truck.

“You made the shape of a helium atom,” I said, “and you got helium. Now there’s a crop circle shaped like ammonium nitrate. I am guessing—and this is by way of a hypothesis, mind you—that something is asking for a fair trade. It gave you what you asked for, and it wants ammonium nitrate in return.”

“But I didn’t mean to ask for helium.”

“I am aware of that, Bob.”

“I’d’ve asked for gold, if I knew we were gettin’ wishes.”

“By rights I’m supposed to put you a watchlist for all this fertilizer,” Marlene said. “You could blow something up with it.”

Bob and his mother got into an argument about watchlists and whether Bob was keeping on the down low, as he said, or whether he was on so many watchlists already that one more barely mattered, as she said. I finally stepped in and said I’d pay for the fertilizer and put my name down. Then Marlene surprised me by flipping the closed sign and hopping into the truck cab with me.

“If you’re gonna blow something up, I wanna watch,” she told me, and I’m not saying a word against her parenting because Lord knows she didn’t deserve Bob, but at the same time, you could occasionally see a bit of family resemblance, if you get what I’m saying.

Anyway, she was a bit disappointed when instead of explosions, she had to help spread bulk fertilizer over the area covered by the fancy crop circles.

“You know this stuff will burn the grass,” she said.

“I believe the grass has already been a casualty of communication,” I said.

“Huh.” She cut open another bag. “So is it aliens, then?”

“Why would aliens want fertilizer?”

“Why do they want to probe people’s butts?”

I was forced to admit that Marlene had a valid point. Still, I really wasn’t sold on the theory of aliens. I had a gut feeling that it was something a lot lower to the ground.

About then I realized that Bob wasn’t helping us anymore. Turned out that he had looked up a diagram of a gold atom on his phone and was trying to draw one with a stick. I stood around and told him when he’d gotten the electrons in the wrong place, but eventually the entertainment value paled, so I dropped Marlene off at the feed store and went home.

I was at the coffee shop looking at pictures of baby hippos when Bob dropped into the chair beside me, looking pissed off. He dropped a plastic baggie full of yellow powder on the table and said, unnecessarily, “It ain’t gold.”
I lifted the baggie and turned it a few times, until the penny dropped. “It’s more of that slime mold you got everywhere.”

“But I asked for gold.”

The barista, Sam, was trying not to watch us and I realized he thought I was buying drugs from Bob, which was a depressing thought, because if I was going to buy drugs, I would buy them from Sam instead. I rubbed my temples and pictured Bob’s crude drawing of a gold atom and the elegant crop circles of ammonium nitrate. “Bob,” I said, “where’d you find this?”

“All over my gold atom. Got excited at first.” His voice was more bitter than Sam’s coffee. “And they took all that fertilizer, so now you’re on a watchlist for nothing.”

“The part of a slime mold you see above ground is the fruiting body,” I said slowly.

“The what?”

I sighed. “The slime mold’s junk, Bob.”

Bob shoved his chair back from the table. “What? But I touched it with my bare hands!”

I tried telling him that slime molds have over a thousand potential sexes and one of those was bound to be compatible with his tastes, but oddly enough, this did not seem to make him any happier. He went into the bathroom and scrubbed his hands until they turned red. I stared at the baggie for a minute, then looked something up online.

“Did you know,” I told Bob, when he came back, “that the largest organism on earth is not Pando the aspen forest but a honey fungus in eastern Oregon?”

Bob gazed at me with total non-comprehension, which was an expression I was pretty used to seeing. So I explained about Pando, which is a bunch of clones of birch trees that covers a hundred acres and then about the Humongous Fungus, which covers a couple thousand. “So you see, things underground can get really, really big.”

“And what does this have to do with me not getting gold from aliens?”

“It’s not aliens,” I said, as the last pieces fell into place. “You’re not getting gold from a giant slime mold.”

Well, to make a long story a little less long, I called some folks I knew from the university who came out and met with Bob’s crop-circle maker, and they confirmed that it was about two acres worth of mycelium and a helluva lot smarter than one usually expects mycelium to be. I don’t know why they were surprised, since slime molds can run mazes and all kinds of weird things, but I suppose being able to abstractly conceptualize the shapes of molecules is a bit different than running a maze, when you get right down to it.

Anyway, communicating with a being that communicates by killing grass in the shapes of atoms was a bit complicated, but some clever dickens managed to smother grass in a Fibonacci sequence and then they were off and running. Running where, I don’t know, but that’s somebody else’s problem. I’m too old to go around playing binary charades. That’s what we’ve got grad students for.

The university ended up buying Bob’s property which was probably better for everybody, since Bob was trying to use weed-killer to express his desire for gold. The slime-mold couldn’t actually make elements, it had just located a pocket of gases a couple hundred feet down and it was good at separating them, which was why it was able to provide the helium that presumably it thought Bob was requesting. Last I heard, the university was in negotiations to borrow a couple hunks to use as filters. All it seems to want in return is fertilizer, but I guess that’s understandable.

My old buddy Wilmarth from the university asked if I wanted to author the paper but I said that I was too much work and I’d be happy just to be a co-author. Bob was a little bitter that the slime-mold got a co-author credit too and he didn’t, but I told him it had been named Fuligo robertii in his honor, and he thought that was pretty cool. The university bought him a nice triple wide and he set it up on Marlene’s back forty. Last time I went in to get feed for the ladies, she said that he was still making crop-circles in the crabgrass, trying to get hisself a proper gold slime-mold this time.

Wilmarth says that Fuligo robertii might be more than a thousand years old and just never paid much attention to mammals until Bob’s pool made a shape it understood. I felt a little bad, thinking that its first contact with humanity was Bob, but y’know, it could have gone a lot worse. It’s happy, the university’s happy, and Bob’s as happy as Bob ever gets.

And me, well, I’m still just happy I’m retired.

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Host Commentary

Ten years ago, T Kingfisher first introduced us to Bob in our ezine, Mothership Zeta, issue 2. “That Time with Bob and the Unicorn” was just weird enough that we knew there had to be more to Bob’s story, so we were delighted when Kingfisher delivered more absurd science fiction about Bob for our 20th anniversary.

What is there to say about Bob? He is a nexus of weird. Not bright in the least, and definitely someone willing to cut corners however he can, but he has a knack for landing himself into the wildest situations.

Kingfisher is a multi award winning author who writes primarily in horror and fantasy. Or dark fantasy. Or fantasy that she thinks is just fine, thank you very much, but freaks everyone else out and she has to say, “Oh, I guess that’s horror.” But with her knowledge of obscure facts about plants and animals (see most any award speech she’s ever given), she can write a weird sf story with the best of them.

Bob is a fitting story for our 20th, because it’s as fun as you can possibly get without involving roller coasters or waving mascots. And we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

So thank you. Thank you listeners, who are with us every week. Thank you supporters, for allowing us to grow from a one person, one podcast project to Escape Artists, a 501 c 3 nonprofit with a whole admin staff, containing five magazines, each with a full editorial staff. Thank you to Alasdair Stuart and Marguerite Kenner for steering this ship to the amazing place it is now. Thanks to the authors for trusting us with their stories.

If that sounds like an award speech, well, we did win an award. Escape Pod is 20 years old.
Escape Pod is a production of Escape Artists Inc., and is distributed on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Share it, but don’t change it or charge for it. All other rights are reserved by our authors.

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Our music is by permission of Daikaiju. You can hear more from them at daikaiju.org.
That was our show for this week. Our quote comes from author Shannon L Alder “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t being said. The art of reading between the lines is a lifelong quest of the wise.”


Stay safe, and stay kind. And as our first editor, Serah Eley says, have fun.