Stuck Here...
   Stuck Here on a Starship for a Hundred Years Without No Body Blues
Lyrics Copyright 1984 Stephen Savitzky.  CC by-nc-sa/4.0.
        Music:  Talking Blues (traditional arr. Savitzky)

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, uh, 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.


    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 damned good deal when you're 
about to die.


    'Til you've had a decade or two to 
    think it over.
    Gets lonely out here.
    A thousand frozen colonists don't count.

So there behind my solar sail 
Are five hundred hunks of frozen tail
But if I thawed one and you know I could
It wouldn't do me a bit of good.


    What would I use?
    I've got no damned body, just a starship.
    Couldn't even... oh, the heck with it!

Now a couple of billion miles astern
It's another lonesome sucker's turn.
So I'll radio back and say ``Hey you--
Oh, I didn't know they took women, too!''


    ``Lovely night tonight, isn't it?
    Look at all them pretty stars.
    Yeah, me too.''

So we'll talk, and murmer ``I love you''
Like other star-crossed lovers do
And in eighty years we've made a date--
Did you ever see two starships mate?


    We've got our robot crews, 
    And we figure they can put together--
    Oh, none of your damned business!



Online:
    http://Steve.Savitzky.net/Songs/stuck/lyrics.txt

Automatically generated with flktran from ../Lyrics/stuck.flk.