Meek and mild mannered bookkeeper Henry Limpet has few passions in life. It's mid-1941 and he would love to join the Navy but has been rated 4F. His friend George Stickle is in the Navy and lays it on pretty thick. If Henry could have one thing it would be to become a fish. While on a visit to Coney Island, Henry falls into the water and miraculously gets his wish. Now a fish, he makes friends, Ladyfish and Crabby the hermit crab and loves his new life. He also uses his abilities to help the US Navy locate and sink Nazi U-Boats, forcing the Germans to create a new weapon to deal with the Allies secret weapon. When years later the Navy finds intelligent activity among dolphins, they may also know who is teaching them.

A man who is having an affair with a married woman is dropped off on the wrong street when going back to his hotel. He takes refuge out of the rain when an old man invites him in. He turns out to be a mortician, who tells him the stories of the people who have wound up in his establishment over the course of four stories.

Harry Caul is a devout Catholic and a lover of jazz music who plays his saxophone while listening to his jazz records. He is a San Francisco-based electronic surveillance expert who owns and operates his own small surveillance business. He is renowned within the profession as being the best, one who designs and constructs his own surveillance equipment. He is an intensely private and solitary man in both his personal and professional life, which especially irks Stan, his business associate who often feels shut out of what is happening with their work. This privacy, which includes not letting anyone into his apartment and always telephoning his clients from pay phones, is in part intended to control what happens around him. His and Stan's latest job, a difficult one, is to record the private discussion of a young male/female couple meeting in crowded and noisy Union Square. The arrangement with his client, known only to him as "the director", is to provide the audio recording of the ...