a goodly number of boulder 's previous population had run like rabbits because of the air testing center scare , but still ... harold supposed that , as the burial committee grew with the population , it was just barely possible that they might get most of the bodies in the ground by the first heavy snowfall ( not that he himself expected to be around by then ) , and most of the people would never know how real the danger of some new epidemic - one they were n't immune to - had been .