Meanwhile the separate provinces fought the invaders and lost touch with each other until the biggest unit of government was a warlord with a troop of horsemen and a fort on a hill. Language dissolved into a babble of barbaric new dialects. But agents of the building society travelled around the continent opening branch-offices shaped like the work at the centre. Members used these offices as holiday homes, schools and hospitals. Since there was no currency they paid their contributions in gifts of food and labour, and the agents served everyone with regular meals as a foretaste of the day when all good people would live together in God’s eternal house. Society business was conducted in the language of the old construction company, the only language which could be written and read, so the local rulers needed the help of an agent before they could send a letter or inscribe a law. When at last, under threat of new invasions from the rim, the warlords united into dukedoms and kingdoms, the building society provided them with a civil service. The new kingdoms did not exactly correspond to the ancient provinces. They fitted together like the wedges of a cut cake, the thin edges touching the axletree at the centre. Trade revived, gold flowed into the foreman’s vaults, the work was gradually re-peopled and repaired. Then building resumed. The work arose in arching buttresses and glittering pinnacles until it vanished into the bright cloud which reappeared above it. The work now went ahead as in the days of the old construction company, but with a different aim. The old company had been making a safe home for shareholders and their servants in the present. The new building society offered a safe home to everybody in the future.
When the great work entered the cloud many of us thought heaven had been reached and our foreman was talking to the divine architect. Everyone with spare money travelled to see him and tried to eat a meal in the works canteen. This led to over-crowding, so a foreman was elected who promised to enlarge the canteen and decorate it more lavishly than before. But finding himself short of cash he raised it by issuing a block of shares and auctioning them round the continent. These promised the buyers priority over other members when God came to allocate comfortable apartments in the finished work. Unluckily, however, the building society was still nominally a cooperative, and its advertisements still promised the best apartments to the poorest members, partly to compensate them for the living conditions they endured while the work was being built, partly because their labour was more important to it than gold. An angry agent working at ground level in a northern kingdom nailed up a list of objections:
1. The great work belonged to God, so nobody could buy or sell a place in it, and the foreman’s shares were useless paper.
2. The new canteen was a waste of money and labour. The first and best foremen had been rough labourers who served humble meals in dark cellars.
3. Corrupt agents inside the axletree had brought real building to a halt. In recent years the only work on the summit had turned it into a pleasure-park for the amusement of the foreman and his friends.
The foreman replied that:
1. The work certainly belonged to God, who had decided to sell some of it and had told the foreman to act as his broker.
2. The canteen was the most essential part of the axletree, for nobody would work on it without regular meals. The earliest foremen had indeed been poor cooks by modern standards but only because the laws of the time stopped them using a decent kitchen.
3. Building had not come to a halt. More people laboured on the work than ever before. There was no amusement park on the summit, just a good hotel for important visitors.
The protesting agent responded by calling on kings and people everywhere to seize the axletree and restore it to cooperative management. So great armies assembled, some to defend the work and some to seize it, for many were jealous of the wealth it contained.
Before the fighting began one of the architects employed on the fabric made a surprising suggestion. He said the building had run into financial trouble because it was conical — every three feet on the height required an addition of two to the entire circumference. This ensured stability, but unless the workforce continually increased it also ensured that the growth of the building became imperceptible, as was the present case. Since steady growth was financially impossible the work was therefore condemned by its shape to a history of booms and slumps. The last slump had destroyed the old construction company. The next would break up the building society, unless it used a cheaper method of working. He suggested that if the axletree were built on a framework of iron beams and hoops it could rise from the present summit in a straight, safe, and surprisingly cheap shaft. Even if heaven were twice the height of the present structure he would undertake to reach it in fifty years. Our foreman and the protesting agent found the idea so ludicrous that they hardly even denounced it, for both thought the shape of the axletree was as much God’s gift as its purpose, and to doubt one was to doubt the other. So armies marched inside and warfare spread along every gallery from base to summit.
At first the foreman’s people held the high places and the attackers tried to starve them by intercepting food supplies from the base, but the base was vast, and when the attackers got onto higher platforms they lost control of it. Soon both sides held vertical sections converging at the top and separated by uncertain people in the middle. The contestants paused to gather more wealth and weapons from their supporters on the ground, and during this pause leaders on both sides started squabbling — each was a king in his own lands and disliked sharing his gains with the rest. So by mutual agreement, by force or by fraud the great work was split into as many sections as the surrounding nations, and this arrangement was also unstable. Many had fought for their king because he had promised to share out the profits locked in the axletree. They now found they had given him extra power to tax them and were not even getting the social benefits granted by the building society. Revolts broke out at ground level, kings fought their own people and did not always win. Many new sorts of government got into the axletree but all looked rather like the old construction company. We had monarchies ruled by a company chairman, and plutocracies with a strong board of directors, and republics with a parliament of shareholders; yet all got their food, fuel and raw material from poorly paid people on the ground outside. Half these companies acknowledged the works foreman and ate food cooked by his agents, but they did not pay him enough money to go on building. His hotel on the old summit was now ringed by a crown of separate summits, for each national company had begun building on the highest part of its own side, using the methods of the discredited architect. Iron frames were common but conservative companies built as much as possible with stone, so their summits tended to top-heaviness. Very competitive companies over-awed their rivals with grandiose summits of bravely painted plaster, for the highest had reached a level of calm air high above the cloud and winds which soaked and buffeted the building lower down. And all these summits were bright with flags and glittering weapons, though fear of warfare at that height prevented fighting from rising far above ground level. It was a long time before the strength of the superstructures was tested. The managers in them were much closer to each other than to their employees lower down, so the summits were linked by bridges which provided reinforcement, though each bridge had a section which could be pulled back when neighbours quarrelled. And the word tower was never spoken, because towers were still notorious for sometimes falling down.