 What does the falling glass symbolize?
A FALL OF GLASS By STANLEY R. LEE Illustrated by DILLON [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1960. The weatherman was always right: Temperature, 59; humidity, 47%; occasional light showers—but of what? The sun was a flaming orange ball in a cloudless blue sky. 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. 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. Dome weevils, their metal arms reaching out with molten glass, roamed the huge casserole, ceaselessly patching and repairing. 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. 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. It couldn't be tolerated within the confines of a dome. 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. 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. 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 A falling piece of glass dissolved into a puff of gossamer against the windshield.
 The cracking of an illusion of safety and optimal conditions in a chaotic world inhabited by humans bent on self-destruction
 The importance of bucking authority and tradition in order to identify solutions for problems that plague communities all over the globe  The delicate balance that countries -- large and small, developed and developing -- must strike if they are to preserve Earth's natural resources  The deterioration of boundaries between members of different races, genders, social classes, and religious factions  The cracking of an illusion of safety and optimal conditions in a chaotic world inhabited by humans bent on self-destruction