Security by Poul Anderson

In a tightly controlled future where Security reaches into science, politics, and private life, physicist Allen Lancaster spends his days battling bureaucracy and his nights retreating into music, whiskey, and solitude. When a secret coded summons draws him away from routine work, he is pulled into a hidden world of censorship, surveillance, and political paranoia, where even a vacation can be replaced by a double and no identity is truly secure. Berg, a Security agent, recruits Lancaster for a top-secret assignment tied to his expertise in dielectrics and whisks him toward a clandestine off-world laboratory. There, aboard a secret space station built from the wreck of the Waikiki and staffed by an unlikely multinational team—including Karen Marek, Isaacson, Hwang, and the owl-faced Martian Rakkan—Lancaster discovers a rough, improvised but brilliant scientific community. The project's goal is the creation of the perfect dielectric, a breakthrough that could transform power, electronics, and transportation, or destabilize the balance of power altogether. As Lancaster confronts the tension between freedom and control, innovation and bureaucracy, he is forced to decide how far he will go in a world where science is inseparable from state power. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.