A science fiction story that reads like a Kafkaesque nightmare - the world is bleak and overwhelming, the characters communicate in paradoxes, and the narrative shifts from scene to scene without ever making sense or asking the reader to believe it. The ending is rather vague, if read solely on its own merits, but in the context of the entire story there is a subtle implicaiton that the entire story was a dream and that the main protagonist is just about to wake up.