In general the population of the City had become forgetful of curtailed freedoms, as a snake no longer remembers the legs of his forebears. Somewhere someone has stated "When the discrepancy between the theory and practice of a culture is very great, this indicates that the culture is undergoing rapid change." By such a test the culture of the City was stable, if not static. The population ordered their lives by schedule, classification and precedent, satisfied with the bland rewards of Organization. Dodkin's Job is Jack Vance's deceptively simple classic about the organization of modern society. First published in the October 1959 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Later collected in Future Tense (1964) (subsequently published as Dust of Far Suns in 1981) and Hard-Luck Diggings (2010)