Earthquake Weather by Tim Powers Page A

in the IV tube cleared instantly when he opened the valve to full flow.
    “She punched a guy,” said Armentrout shortly. “Just soft-tissue damage to her hand, no crepitation.”
    “I hope he’s not pissed off—very shortly now she won’t remember doing it.” He taped onto Plumtree’s right forefinger the pulse oxymeter that would shine a white light through her fingertip and monitor her oxygen level by changes in the ruby red color of her flesh.
    “This guy can’t remember his own name,” absently remarked the nurse who was peeling the backs off of the wire-tethered plastic disks that were the heart-monitor EKG electrodes. She began pressing the disks sticky-side-down onto Plumtree’s skin at each shoulder and hip and then in a cascade pattern around Plumtree’s left breast.
    “Get her on the ventilator,” snapped Armentrout.
    The anesthetist obediently pried open Plumtree’s mouth and pushed in past her teeth the steel shaft of a laryngoscope that was guiding a balloon-tipped plastic tube into her throat; and when he had got the tube far down her trachea and inflated the cuff to get an occlusive seal, the ventilator began chugging and sighing as it forced oxygen in and out of her lungs.
    “And inflate the blood-pressure cuff,” Armentrout said; “it’s time to get the succinylcholine running.” Armentrout was hunched over Plumtree’s head now, ruffling the thatch of her blond hair and at measured intervals poking down into her scalp the tiny needles of the EEG electrodes that would measure her brain-wave activity.
    Plumtree’s semi-nude body shivered under the monitor wires as the succinylcholine hit, then relaxed totally—Armentrout knew that the motor end plates of all of her voluntary muscle fibers had now subsided in depolarization, and only the insistence of the ventilator was even keeping her lungs flexing.
    A nurse now leaned over the unconscious woman to fit a bifurcated foam-rubber bite block around the endotrachial tube and between the teeth of Plumtree’s upper and lower jaws.
    Finally Armentrout smeared conducting jelly on the steel disks that would deliver the voltage, and he carefully stuck one onto each of Plumtree’s temples—this would be a full bilateral square wave procedure, not one of the wishy-washy unilateral with one of the disks stuck onto the forehead. Armentrout knew it wouldn’t damage her—he had undergone a series of full bilateral-wave ECTs himself, when he had been just seventeen years old, after his mother’s death.
    “Low voltage tracing,” said the nurse who was watching the EEG monitor; “huh!—with some intermittent sleep spindles at about fourteen hertz.”
    “That’s to be expected,” said Armentrout, not looking at the anesthetist. “You’ll see some biphasics, too, if we make a loud noise.” He looked at his watch—it had been two full minutes since the muscle-disabling succinylcholine had gone coursing down the IV tube. “Clear!” he called, and everybody stepped back from Plumtree’s electrode-studded body. For a moment Armentrout let his eyes play over her breasts, the exposed nipples erect in the chilly air of the treatment room, and the wisp of blond pubic hair curling above the elastic waistband of her TUESDAY -stitched panties, and then he twisted the dial on the plastic monitor box to two hundred and fifty joules, took a deep breath, and flipped the toggle switch.
    Instantly Plumtree’s left hand twitched and clenched in a fist, for the tight constriction of the blood-pressure cuff had effectively prevented the neuromuscular blocking drug from getting into her forearm.
    “Total chaos,” calmly said the nurse who was watching the EEG monitor. Plumtree’s brain waves on the screen were a forest of tight, wildly disordered peaks. “A ten on the Richter scale.”
    Then, slowly, the middle finger of Plumtree’s tight-clenched left hand unfolded and extended out straight.
    The anesthetist noticed it and laughed. “She’s flipping