A Cosmic Crisis

While sociologists have ben pondering the impact of the Atom on the American Home, the Bendix on the Mother, and Video on the Book of the Month, the issue of Man versus Machine grimly confronted an Oklshoma draft board this week. Into the impartial manpower maw of Selective Service went a man who might well be a machine. The wheel, to quote one authority, had turned a full circle.

There was no question about it. Twenty-year-old Jack Husband of Hollis, Oklahoma, a student at Southwestern University, actually ticks like a clock. Since the age of nine, specialists have examined him in vain, and found no answer to the methodical ticking which is clearly audible about four inches from Mr. Husband's head. Thus, far, only Army medical men have found a diagnosis. Their verdict; 1-A--induct him.

Although appealing in its simplicity to the military mind, this hardly disposes of the case. Those thinkers concerned with the evolution of the species cannot fail to take notice of Mr. Husband and his cephalic tick-tock. Heretofore mankind has feared that the machines it created would someday engulf it. Hardly reckoned upon has been the spectre of human devolution into protoplasmic mechanisms. Today, the public turns apprehensively to these tight-lipped toilers in Social Relations Laboratories the country over for polysyllabic reassurance. It is to be hoped that the experts will not stand mute to the challenge.