Stanisław Lem projects a future America where a Uranian virus threatens the destruction of all paper. The final stronghold of the “papyrocracy” is the hermetically sealed underground structure known only as “The Building.” Its labyrinthine net of corridors is a world of complete subterfuge—with polygraph, mittens, bugged percolators, and microphone pillows. Into the clockwork precision of this vestigial Pentagon plunges a young wanderer, unaware of the self-devouring complex of espionage that is a way of life, the rhythm of The Building… Lem has created a chilling, brilliantly satiric vision of “the ultimate bureaucracy”—where everyone is a spy, but no-one knows his mission.