"Hah! They were brother and sister!" the librarian shouted in her parched voice, her old buckram eyes laughing with cunning.
Fownes smiled weakly and looked again at the dust jacket. The twister was unquestionably a meteorological phenomenon. It spun ominously, like a malevolent top, and coursed the countryside destructively, carrying a Dorothy to an Oz. He couldn't help wondering if twisters did anything to feminine pulses, if they could possibly be a part of a moonlit night, with cocktails and roses. He absently stuffed the dust jacket in his pocket and went on into the other rooms, the librarian mumbling after him: "Edna Murdoch Featherstone, April 21, 1991," as though reading inscriptions on a tombstone.
The Movement met in what had been the children's room, where unpaid ladies of the afternoon had once upon a time read stories to other people's offspring. The members sat around at the miniature tables looking oddly like giants fled from their fairy tales, protesting.
"Where did the old society fail?" the leader was demanding of them. He stood in the center of the room, leaning on a heavy knobbed cane. He glanced around at the group almost complacently, and waited as Humphrey Fownes squeezed into an empty chair. "We live in a dome," the leader said, "for lack of something. An invention! What is the one thing that the great technological societies before ours could not invent, notwithstanding their various giant brains, electronic and otherwise?"
Fownes was the kind of man who never answered a rhetorical question. He waited, uncomfortable in the tight chair, while the others struggled with this problem in revolutionary dialectics.
"A sound foreign policy," the leader said, aware that no one else had obtained the insight. "If a sound foreign policy can't be created the only alternative is not to have any foreign policy at all. Thus the movement into domes began—by common consent of the governments. This is known as self-containment."
Dialectically out in left field, Humphrey Fownes waited for a lull in the ensuing discussion and then politely inquired how it might be arranged for him to get out.
"Out?" the leader said, frowning. "Out? Out where?"
"Outside the dome."