Two minutes till I die / willie tucker's blues-draft

Two minutes till I die / Willie Tucker's blues-draft

see willie Tucker's blues and Ten year sentence 6/8/10 and 6/9/10
compile and merge all

fiction
edward w pritchard

You can see the flare that will kill you from a volcanic explosion on Jupiter two
minutes before you die. Shock waves travel strangely in the dense gravity of Jupiter, and in dense space between Jupiter and it's moon Io; but eventually a shock wave from a major volcanic explosion on Jupiter will kill you. End you and obliterate you at least if you are human, but on a cosmic scale the volcanic dance of push/pull between Jupiter, Io and gravity has been going on for millions of years without much change to either.

I was driving my bulldozer on Io's surface and by chance happened to look up exactly as the eruption occurred. The flash of a major level twenty two blast is brilliant and for a moment or two I forgot my training and just watched the optics. Then out of habit and with the benefit of countless hours of drill and rehearsal I hit my stop watch and focused the cameras in the dozer's cab to capture the shock wave images that would annihilate me in one minute and 49 seconds. Training or no I wasted another twelve seconds adjusting and arranging my personal items in the cab before I got down to protocol for one's last few minutes to live from Jupiter's volcanic activity.

From one minute and thirty five seconds to one minute fifteen I sent and saved to off site disc various surface pressure measures of Io's atmosphere and then today's excavation reports of Io's and Jupiter's underground compression ratios, and various specific gravity analysis data concerning water pressure, and other underground liquids. That done, I had insured that my life insurance proceeds would be paid by the corporation to my beneficiaries. Business and duty concluded, I could relax and enjoy my last minute and a quarter to live.

Using my stylus and micro-lap top I decided to write to Lalie my girlfriend, killed about ten days ago also in earthquakes on Io, rather than to Sharon my fiance back in Chicago on earth who I hadn't seen in twenty six months, spoken to in four or thought much of in five months. It being five months almost to a day since I first laid eyes on Lalie.

Without much time first I downloaded and saved two files I had wrote before for Lalie, one that I had published for her Eulogy, and then I wrote a fast blues piece for Lalie, began below then finished in part two

To Lalie:
attached in part 2

end part one.