Uploaded December 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago

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Sung by Frank Hayes. Thanks to rocketman0739 for providing high-quality versions of these songs.
Download the album here: archive.org/details/filk_free_fall_and_other_delights
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Lyrics:

When you build a ship to sail deep space, you can't have a crew of mortal race,
'Cause a hundred years from star to star with a human crew is just too far.
Think of all the beer you'd have to carry!
Not to mention food, and...other necessities.

So you fill your ship with a robot crew, and you build a computer captain, too
You get some experience for free, from some old spacer's personality
Like maybe an old shuttle pilot who's just learned from his last mistake.
That's where I come in.

So you take some bloke who's halfway dead, and you haul him home and you scan his head,
And a hundred years of flying high is a damn good deal when you're about to die...
Till you've had a decade or two to think it over.
It gets lonely out here!
And a thousand frozen colonists don't count.

So there, behind my solar sail, are five hundred hunks of frozen tail
If I thawed one out, and I know I could, it wouldn't do me a bit of good.
What would I use?
Don't have any damn body, just this starship.
Couldn't even...well, anyway...

Now, a couple of billion miles astern, it's another lonesome sucker's turn
So I'll radio back, and I'll say, "Hey, you! —Oh, I didn't know they took women, too!
Heh, lovely night out tonight, isn't it?
Look at all those pretty stars!
Yeah, me too."

So we'll talk and murmur "I love you," like other star-crossed lovers do,
And in eighty years we've made a date. Ever see two starships mate?
We've got all these robots, and we figure we can put together...
Um...
None of your damn business.