 Why have so many people resorted to pick-pocketing?
The weatherman was always right: Temperature, 59; humidity, 47%; occasional light showers—but of what? He was strolling along a quiet residential avenue: small private houses, one after another, a place of little traffic and minimum distractions. But he was thinking about weather, which was an unusual subject to begin with for a person living in a domed city. The sidewalk was wide enough to allow four people to pass at one time. In the ensuing contretemps they emptied his rear pants pockets, got his wristwatch and restored the contents of the handkerchief pocket. It fell on the streets and houses, making small geysers of shiny mist, hitting with a gentle musical sound, like the ephemeral droppings of a celesta. It was precipitation peculiar to a dome: feather-light fragments showering harmlessly on the city from time to time. It was this rather than skill that enabled the police to maintain such a tight surveillance on him, a surveillance that went to the extent of getting his fingerprints off the postman's bag, and which photographed, X-rayed and chemically analyzed the contents of his pockets before returning them. Two blocks away from his home a careless housewife spilled a five-pound bag of flour as he was passing. By the time Fownes reached his front door an entire dossier complete with photographs had been prepared and was being read by two men in an orange patrol car parked down the street. Lanfierre's job was to ferret out aberration. Conformity had become more than a social force; it was a physical necessity. He came to see that genuine quirks were rare and, as time went on, due partly to his own small efforts, rarer. Lanfierre had held out on Fownes for months. He had even contrived to engage him in conversation once, a pleasantly absurd, irrational little chat that titillated him for weeks. After years of searching for differences Lanfierre had seen how extraordinarily repetitious people were, echoes really, dimly resounding echoes, each believing itself whole and separate. "It's like this, MacBride. "They say there are mountain-tops where winds blow all the time. Winds like you and I can't imagine. And if there was a house sitting on such a mountain and if winds did blow, it would shake exactly the way that one does. "Sometimes I think there's a whole crowd of people in there waiting for a signal—as if they all had something important to say but had to close the windows first
 The pickpocketers are trying to acquire information about Fownes
 Resources are scarce in the Dome, so people have to resort to desperate measures  The pickpocketers are trying to acquire information about Fownes  All possessions are shared in the Dome under a new form of communism  There are no laws in the Dome, and people do whatever they please