Frank Herbert · 1956 · sea
Frank Herbert's first novel, serialised in Astounding a decade before Dune. The West has run out of oil and sends nuclear subtugs to siphon it from wells off the enemy's own coast, towing it home in plastic barges. Twenty have failed to return, and a psychologist is put aboard the twenty-first to find the saboteur among a crew of four.
- 1Charleston
The Security screening and a five-week crash course in electronics for a Bureau of Psychology man being planted in a four-man crew - and the briefing that says twenty subtugs have gone out on this run and none has come back.
- 2The marine tunnel
The Fenian Ram leaves the pens through a tunnel opening into a canyon wall at fifty fathoms, coasting out among fan kelp and gorgonian coral to settle in the mud and wait - Herbert's first paragraph as a novelist.
- 3The North Atlantic
Weeks submerged, and the crises start: a body in the shielded reactor room, a homing beacon in the console, a silk rag left where an oil spray will make a spark - and a psychologist watching three men for the one who did it.
- 4The Norwegian Basin
North into enemy water with the hunt closing, going below safe diving depth to shake a patrol and raising internal pressure to keep the hull from folding - the title working literally and otherwise at the same time.
- 5Novaya Zemlya
The undersea well off the Eastern Powers' own coast, unaccountably still unknown to them - where the Ram pumps crude into a towed plastic barge the size of a small ship, which is the image the whole book is built on.
- 6The Barents Sea
Homeward with the barge behind them and the enemy across the whole exit, and Garcia is finally the man - a sleeper who does not know he is one, which is the answer Ramsey has been sent to find and does not enjoy.
- 7Charleston
They get the oil back, and the last chapter is two psychologists discussing what the service is doing to the men who fly these missions - and Ramsey being told he is now a hero, which he regards as the worst outcome available.