 While Whitt and his secretary dig into the seafloor, Xavier and his concubine Olivia (collectively dubbed "X-O") make a solitary escape into the cosmos.Cubleșan reads here a warning against "man's isolation within the circle of his self-sufficiency".As philologist Elvira Sorohan notes, there are various tributes to the Czechoslovak science-fiction classic Karel Čapek, to the point of intertextuality.