"We can't go on taking from everyone else like this!" protested Mrs. Maddox. "They have as much right to it as we. There should be a lottery or something to determine who gets the vaccine."
"Hilliard's orders," said Dr. Adams. "Besides, we've settled all this. You first, Ken."
For a few days after the battle with the nomads, it had seemed as if the common terror had welded all of Mayfield into an impregnable unit. There was a sense of having stood against all that man and nature could offer, and of having won out against it. However, the penetrating reality of impending competition among themselves for the necessities of life, for the very right to live, had begun to shatter the bonds that held the townspeople as one.
The killing of the college student in protest against the partiality to College Hill was the first blast that ripped their unity. Some protested openly against the viciousness of it, but most seemed beyond caring.
There were two events of note in the days following. The first was a spontaneous, almost valley-wide resurgence of memory of Granny Wicks and her warnings. Everything she had said had come true. The feeling swept Mayfield that here in their very midst was an oracle of truth who had been almost wholly ignored. There was nothing they needed to know so much as the outcome of events with respect to themselves and to the town as a whole.
Almost overnight, streams of visitors began to pour toward the home for the aged where Granny lived. When they came, she smiled knowingly and contentedly, as if she had been expecting them, waiting for them. Obligingly, and with the peaceful aura of omniscience, she took them into her parlor and told them of things to come.
At the same time, Frank Meggs felt new stirrings within him. He sensed that he had been utterly and completely right in all his years of criticism of those who managed the affairs of Mayfield. The present condition of things proved it. The town was in utter chaos, its means of survival all but destroyed. Incompetently, its leaders bumbled along, not caring for the mass of the people, bestowing the people's goods on the leaders' favorites. He began saying these things on the streets. He got a box, and used it for a platform, and he shouted from the street corners that the leaders were corrupt, and none of them were safe unless College Hill and City Hall were wiped out. He said that he would be a better mayor than anyone else in Mayfield.
He had listeners. They gathered on the corners in the daytime, and they listened at night by the light of flaming torches. Many people began to believe that he was right.
A week after Mrs. Larsen's illness, it was evident beyond all doubt that Mayfield was the victim of a killer epidemic. Mayor Hilliard himself was stricken, and he sent word that he wanted Professor Maddox, Ken, and Dr. Larsen to come to his bedside.