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thought to have been smallpox.
    The first order of business was to figure out what type of microbe was killing the people of San Joaquin: bacterium, virus, or parasite. Circumstances pointed to a virus, possibly spread by insects, so the team set up two small laboratories located seventy-five yards apart. The first, an existing tile-roofed adobe building, housed Johnson’s glove-box contraption and a variety of other equipment and research animals used to isolate microscopic organisms from blood and tissue samples. The second laboratory was built to order by the local people out of lashed poles and thatching. It housed wild insects and animals Kuns and his assistants caught in the San Joaquin area. The team planned to study those animals to determine what species might be carrying the deadly microbes.
    The facilities were kept separate to avoid cross-contamination, and the buildings were fitted with window screens and tight doors. Finally, the laboratories were heavily doused with DDT and ringed with rodent traps to protect the scientists from whatever creatures might be carrying the disease.
    In June, after days of haggling with the San Joaquin community over the propriety of such things, Valverde convinced the local priest to allow MacKenzie to perform an autopsy on one of the recent victims of the epidemic. A few days later, a two-year-old boy died and from his spleen and brain the team was able to isolate a substance that, when injected into hamsters, produced the disease. Days after the boy died the team completed several more tests that proved the mysterious disease was caused by a virus: they ruled out a parasite or bacteria on the basis of both the minuscule size of filters through which the microbe readily passed and its ability to withstand antibiotics. They also showed the microbe could destroy human cells and cause disease in wild mice. 1
    Midway through the autopsy on the child, Hugo Garrón’s scalpel slipped,
flew across the autopsy table, and hit MacKenzie’s hand. Looking at the blood that instantly filled his punctured glove, MacKenzie looked up at Garrón and predicted the worst.
    An anxious week passed without symptoms, and MacKenzie decided he was, indeed, a very lucky person. With greater care, he and Garrón performed several more autopsies and were struck by the level of devastation the mysterious microbe produced. Most alarming were the disease victims’ brains: where clear cerebrospinal fluid should have been there was, instead, crimson blood; all of the meningeal protective layers around the brain were blood-soaked. Eerily, most of the hair fell off victims’ heads before they died.
    Toward the end of June the town had a party, which the scientists used as an opportunity to celebrate their rapid discoveries. The next logical steps in their research would involve characterizing the virus and figuring out exactly how people got infected. Johnson, Kuns, and MacKenzie felt confident all the answers would soon reveal themselves, and enthusiastically joined the celebration, eating and drinking the local specialties. While all three men were in the mood for a fiesta, it was Johnson who, with characteristic gusto, threw himself into the spirit of the event, drinking, dancing, and joining in the local macho sport of telling tall tales. Though not a classically handsome man, Johnson carried himself with a mix of cowboy swagger and charisma that inspired other men and attracted women. MacKenzie too threw himself into the gaiety of the evening, while the shyer, more serious Kuns quietly observed the goings-on.
    On July 3 Johnson and MacKenzie were some twenty miles outside of San Joaquin gathering ticks from the bushes around a chaco , or small cattle ranch. They suspected the virus might be carried by insects and were collecting samples to take back to their field lab for analysis.
    When they began the long trek back to San Joaquin, the shorter Johnson kept having to slow down to avoid