Neal Stephenson - Interface

The PIPER watch beamed out these little images as he made his way across a vast flat cornfield, completely alone, the only thing moving within several miles. His hands bobbed up and down rhythmically as he shuffled down the mile-long rows, reaching out with both arms to grip and yank the tassels, and when something especially interesting came on the screen - a surprise appearance by a major star, for example - he would stop for a minute and stand motionless, staring at his wrist. At the beginning of these evening shifts, the images on the little screen were pale and washed-out, but as he inched his way across the field, and the sun sank into the flat horizon, the light from the watch became brighter, its colors purer, until finally the moon and the stars came out and Vishniak was groping his way across the field in darkness, the images of the National Town Meeting radiating in pure intense colors as though the wristwatch were a bracelet of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires.

Tonight, Governor Cozzano was meeting with a group of black persons who had organized themselves out of the undifferentiated mass of Americans gathered together for the National Town Meeting. They had got together and formed their own little organization which had then promptly splintered into little groups who all hated each other. Now, the leaders of the little factions were meeting with Governor Cozzano over a nice dinner in his hotel suite. They were eating tiny little miniature chickens and drinking wine.

One of the black people was using an analogy to explain why black people were not becoming successful executives in large enough numbers. In the game of football, he pointed out, black people were often valued as wide receivers and running backs, but coaches were resistant to making them quarterbacks. Governor William A. Cozzano listened to this analogy soberly and thought­fully, chewing on a morsel of the miniature chicken and nodding his head from time to time, never taking his gaze off the face of the man who was speaking. When the man was done, Cozzano sat back in his chair, took a sip of wine, and went on a little stroll down memory lane.

"You know, that business about quarterbacks really hits home to me. I can remember back in about 1963 when I was on the Illinois team, and we traveled to Iowa City to play a game against the Hawkeyes. They had a starting quarterback and two others on the bench, all of them white, and they also had a few black players recruited from across the river, here in Illinois. In particular they had a young man named Lucullus Campbell, who had been the starting quarterback for his high-school team in Quincy, Illinois, a river town. He had been splendid in that role - an incredible passer who could also run the ball. Well, before the game even started, the Hawkeyes' starting quarterback was out with the stomach flu. They started their second-string quarterback, and sometime in the second quarter of the game, he took a very serious hit and went down with a knee injury that knocked him out of the game. And so they put in their third-string quarterback.

"And let me tell you, that young man - with all due respect to him - was just no good as a quarterback. He dropped the ball. He threw interceptions. He tried to hand off the ball to people who weren't even there." Cozzano paused for a moment and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin while the people around the table laughed. "Now, I was an offensive player, and so, when their offense was on the field - while this poor fellow was making all of these mistakes - I was on the sidelines, looking straight across the field at poor Lucullus Campbell. He was watching this third-string quarterback in disbelief. I could clearly read the frustration on his face. Finally he got up and approached the coach and spoke to him. I couldn't hear his words, but I knew what he was saying. It's a universal plea: 'Put me in, Coach. I can do it.' And you know what? The coach didn't even look up at him. He wouldn't look Lucullus Campbell in the eye. He just shook his head no and kept going through his clipboard. And I remember thinking that that was just about the most unfair thing I had ever seen. I went up to him after the game and I told him so, and I'd like to think that he took a bit of comfort in my words." Cozzano had delivered the first part of this story with kind of a wry humorous tone, then turned sad. But at this point he became angry at the memory, sat up straight in his chair, and began pounding his index finger into the dinner table. His guests sat riveted. Cozzano, pissed off, was a formidable presence. "Ever since that day, I have found it heart­rending to see talented, ambitious black people, willing and able to compete in whatever field, held back by tired old white men who don't want to give them a chance. And I vow to you that I will never become one of those tired old white men - and I won't allow any of them to serve under me either."

The dinner guests broke into spontaneous applause. Floyd Wayne Vishniak, standing two hundred miles away in a cornfield, who did not give a damn about black persons, got a lump in his throat.

The next day, after he had bought all of his newspapers and read them over a bottomless cup of coffee in a diner, he went to the public library and, with some assistance from a librarian, looked up the microfilms for The Des Moines Register during the fall of 1963. He searched back and forth, the photographed pages zooming across the screen of the microfilm reader, until he found the account of the Illini-Hawkeye game.

An hour later he was out on the road in his truck, headed south along the river, toward the town of Quincy.

After he returned from his night detasseling shift, he sat down at his kitchen table with a beer and a fresh white piece of paper and relayed the results of his research activities to the one man who could make the best use of the information.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak

R.R. 6 Box 895

Davenport, Iowa

Aaron Green

Ogle Data Research

Pentagon Towers

Arlington, Virginia

Dear Mr. Green:

Yesterday night your friend and mine Governor Cozzano told a very interesting dinnertime story about the 1963 Illini-Hawkeye football game and one Lucullus Campbell. This story put a lump in my throat and so I went down to the public library to read more about it, as they often encourage us to do at the end of important TV shows.

Imagine my surprise to discover that the young William A. Cozzano did not even participate in the 1963 game because he was suffering from the stomach flu. He did not even set foot in Iowa City on that day.

Perhaps he just got the year wrong. Well, I checked 1962, '61, and '60 also. In '60 and '62, the game was held in Champaign. In '61, it was held in Iowa City. Cozzano was there all right, but according to the Des Moines Register, the starting quarterback played the whole game.

Perhaps it happened in Champaign? Well, in '60, the starting quarterback for the Hawkeyes got hurt and the second-string quarterback played very well for the entire game. And in '63, the starting quarterback played the entire game.

There was no Lucullus Campbell playing for Iowa ever.

I took a little drive down to Quincy and found out that there was a Lucullus Campbell who played for their high school and who was on the 1959 Illinois Ail-Star team. That was the same year Cozzano was an All-Star. He was a halfback. He never played college ball because he got killed in a car crash on the night of his graduation from high school.

So a person might think that William A. Cozzano is making up lies. That he is a dishonest politician like all the others.

But I do not agree with this idea because I believe in Cozzano and I could see the strong emotion on his face when he told that story. No doubt, he believed in the sincerity of his own words.

Then how to explain it? Is Cozzano crazy?