with--tools, utensils and such. But it hardly seems usable in modern
industry."

The commissar had gone pale with anger by now. He put his two fists on
his desk and leaned upon them, staring down at his seated visitor.
"Comrade," he bit out, "I warn you. Comrade Jankez is enthusiastic
about my successes. Beyond that, not only is he an old comrade, but my
brother-in-law as well."

Josip Pekic nodded, unenthusiastically, and his voice continued to
quiver. "So the trained engineers under you, have already warned me.
However, Comrade Broz, you are ... well, no longer Commissar of the
Steel Complex. My report has already gone in to Comrades Jankez and
Kardelj."

* * * * *

The knock came at the door in the middle of the night as Aleksander
Kardelj had always thought it would.

From those early days of his Party career, when his ambitions had
sent him climbing, pushing, tripping up others, on his way to the top,
he had expected it eventually.

Oh, his had been a different approach, on the surface, an easygoing,
laughing, gentler approach than one usually connected with members of
the Secretariat of the Executive Committee of the Party, but it made
very little difference in the very long view. When one fell from the
heights, he fell just as hard, whether or not he was noted for his
sympathetic easy humor.

The fact was, Aleksander Kardelj was not asleep when the fist pounded
at his door shortly after midnight. He had but recently turned off,
with a shaking hand, the Telly-Phone, after a less than pleasant
conversation with President of the United Balkan Soviet Republics,
Zoran Jankez.

For the past ten years, Kardelj had been able to placate Zoran Jankez,
even though Number One be at the peak of one of his surly rages, rages
which seemed to be coming with increasing frequency of late. As the
socio-economic system of the People's Democratic Dictatorship became
increasingly complicated, as industrialization with its modern
automation mushroomed in a geometric progression, the comparative
simplicity of governing which applied in the past, was strictly of
yesteryear. It had been one thing, rifle and grenades in hand, to
seize the government, after a devastating war in which the nation had
been leveled, and even to maintain it for a time, over illiterate
peasants and unskilled proletarians. But industrialization calls for a
highly educated element of scientists and technicians, nor does it