pproaches cynical treason,
Comrade."

Josip half nodded, said discouragedly, "You forget. By Comrade
Jankez's own orders I ... I can do no wrong. But so much for that.
Now, well, this steel program. I'm afraid it's going to have to be
scrapped."

"Scrapped!" the Commissar of the Transbalkanian Steel Complex stared
at his visitor as though the other was rabid. "You fool! Our steel
progress is the astonishment of the world! Why, not only are our
ultramodern plants, built largely with foreign assistance, working on
a twenty-four hour a day basis, but thousands of secondary smelters,
some so small as to be operated by a handful of comrade citizens, in
backyard establishments, by schoolchildren, working smelters of but a
few tons monthly capacity in the schoolyard, by--"

* * * * *

The newly created State Expediter held up a hand dispiritedly. "I
know. I know. Thousands of these backyard smelters exist ... uh ...
especially in parts of the country where there is neither ore nor fuel
available."

The commissar looked at him.

The younger man said, his voice seemingly deprecating his words, "The
schoolchildren, taking time off from their studies, of course, bring
scrap iron to be smelted. And they bring whatever fuel they can find,
often pilfered from railway yards. And the more scrap and fuel they
bring, the more praise they get. Unfortunately, the so-called scrap
often turns out to be kitchen utensils, farm tools, even, on at least
on occasion, some railroad tracks, from a narrow gauge line running up
to a lumbering project, not in use that time of the year. Sooner or
later, Comrade Broz, the nation is going to have to replace those
kitchen utensils and farm tools and all the rest of the scrap that
isn't really quite scrap."

The commissar began to protest heatedly, but Josip Pekic shook his
head and tried to firm his less than dominating voice. "But even
that's not the worst of it. Taking citizens away from their real
occupations, or studies, and putting them to smelting steel where no
ore exists. The worst of it is, so my young engineer friends tell me,
that while the steel thus produced might have been a marvel back in
the days of the Hittites, it hardly reaches specifications today.
Perhaps it might be used ultimately to make simple farm tools such as
hoes and rakes; if so, it would make quite an endless circle, because
that is largely the source of the so-called steel to begin