I was scrolling through Twitter this morning and came across a gif of a group of cows jumping over the white line on a road.

And it reminded me of a funny Roger Zelazny/Wild Cards story. Also how Roger was freaking brilliant and one of the finest writers ever to grace the field of science fiction and fantasy. Anyway, we were working a particular volume — Down and Dirty — where Roger’s iconic character Croyd Crenson aka The Sleeper has awakened with a horrible new power — He’s a super-spreader of the Wild Card virus and it’s virulent enough that it can even reinfect Aces and Jokers subjecting them to the same terrible odds as the original virus ie 90% of those infected die, of the remaining survivors 90% of them become Jokers and only a tiny handful become Aces.

Once our heroes realize that Croyd has become Typhoid Croyd they have to confine him in a sterile room at the Jokertown Clinic. But at this point in the book Croyd was late in his waking cycle, completely cranked up on speed, paranoid and angry. Roger also had him awakening with super strength in addition to this viral nature. We were all sitting around in George’s living room trying to figure out how to keep Croyd from just breaking the protective glass and leaving to continue infecting the city. We went through all of these options, discarding all of them because they wouldn’t work to contain Croyd.

Then Roger lifted his head and said in the slow, deep voice — “Consider… cows.” We all sort of gaped at him and he gave this little smile and elaborated. “You see, cows are so stupid that if you can’t afford to build a cattle guard you can just paint lines on the pavement and they will think it’s a cattle guard and not cross. What if Croyd is so far gone in his waking cycle that if you just paint bars on the glass of the hospital room he will think he can’t break out.”

So that’s what we did, and if you read that Finn section (I was writing from the POV of my Joker doctor character Dr. Bradly Finn) you will find that I basically just took Roger’s dialogue and put it in the book.