dramatically slowed the rate at which postmortem cell deterioration took
place.
More often than not, Jonas and his team had treated victims of
catastrophic stroke, cardiac arrest, asphyxiation due to tracheal
obstruction, or drug overdose. Those patients usually had suffered at
least some irreversible brain damage prior to or at the moment of death,
before coming under the care of the Resuscitation Project, compromising
their chances of being brought back in perfect condition.
And of those who had died from violent trauma of one kind or another,
some had been too severely injured to be saved even after being
resuscitated. Others had been resuscitated and stabilized, only to
succumb to secondary infections that soon developed into toxic shock.
Three had been dead so long that, once resuscitated, brain damage was
either too severe to allow them to regain consciousness or, if they were
conscious, too extensive to allow them to lead anything like a normal
life.
With sudden anguish and a twinge of guilt, Jonas thought of his
failures, of life incompletely restored, of patients in whose eyes he
had seen the tortured awareness of their own pathetic condition.
“This time will be different.” Kari Dovell’s voice was soft, only a
whisper, but it shattered Jonas’s reverie.
Jonas nodded. He felt considerable affection for these people. For
their sake more than his own, he wanted the team to have a major,
unqualified success.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
Even as he spoke, the double doors to the operating room crashed open,
and two surgical orderlies rushed in with the dead man on a gurney.
Swiftly and skillfully, they transferred the body onto the slightly
tilted operating table, treating it with more care and respect than they
might have shown a corpse in other circumstances, and then exited.
The team went to work even as the orderlies were heading out of the
room. With speed and economy of movement, they scissored the remaining
clothes off the dead man, leaving him naked on his back, and attached to
him the leads of an electrocardiograph, an electroencephalograph, and a
skin-patch digital-readout thermometer.
Seconds were golden. Minutes were beyond price. The longer the man
remained dead, the less chance they had of bringing him back with any
degree of success whatsoever.
Kari DoveIl adjusted the controls of the EKG, sharpening the contrast.
For the benefit of the tape recording that was being made of the entire
procedure, she repeated what all of them could see: “Flat line. No
heartbeat.”
“No alpha, no beta,” Ken Nakamura added, confirming the absence of all
electrical activity in the patient’s brain.
Having wrapped the pressure cuff of a sphygmomanometer around the
patient’s right arm, Helga reported the reading they expected: “No
measurable blood pressure.”
Gina stood beside Jonas, monitoring the digital-readout thermometer.
“Body temperature’s forty-six degrees.”
“So low!” Kari said, her green eyes widening with surprise as she stared
down at the cadaver. “And he must’ve warmed up at least ten degrees
since they pulled him out of that stream. We keep it cool in here, but
not that cool.”
The thermostat was set at sixty-four degrees to balance the comfort of
the resuscitation team against the need to prevent the victim from
warming too fast.
Looking up from the dead man to Jonas, Kari said, “Cold is good, okay,
we want him cold, but not too damned cold. What if his tissues froze
and he sustained massive cerebral damage?”
Examining the dead man’s toes and then his fingers, Jonas was almost
embarrassed to hear himself say, “There’s no indication of vesicles-”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Kari said.
Jonas knew that what she said was true. They all knew it. There would
not have been time for vesicles to form in the dead flesh of
frost-bitten fingertips and toes before the man, himself, had died.
But, damn it, Jonas did not want to give up before they had even
started.
He said, “Still, there’s no sign of necrotic tissue-”
“Because the entire patient is necrotic,” Kari said, unwilling to let go
of it.
Sometimes she seemed as ungainly as a spindly-legged bird that, although
a master of the air, was out of its element on the land. But at of