Woke up around seven in the morning. Took down Form 03 readings, turned on the water heater for breakfast. The emotions of the first days are passing; the entire psyche is reconfiguring itself for a long existence here, the two of us. Before the communication session, I watched as we flew over the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea. I saw an ancient dried-up river — you can distinguish it by the fold and the dark bands along its bed, encroached upon by sand. Once there was water here, life, plants, birds, and now bare desert. I managed to photograph a ring geological structure on the Arabian Peninsula with a handheld camera.

Today is a medical day. Tolya and I each did two experiments: one on the bicycle ergometer, a stress test, with an ECG and head rheogram being recorded. The research was conducted using the domestic “Aelita” apparatus, specially designed for orbital stations. It covers a wide spectrum of measured parameters across various programs and is convenient to use.

A week has passed — not much compared to the whole flight, but it feels as though we’ve been working here for a long time. How will things go from here? I want so much, so very much, for everything to go well. In the last communication session, the operator Pyotr Ivanovich passed along good news for us before bedtime. He told us about our families, said that Lyusya is collecting newspaper clippings about the flight — lots of telegrams from various cities, he said — and read us the TASS bulletin about the launch of the Iskra-2 satellite from Salyut-7.

Weightlessness is astonishing, fantastic, incomprehensible. And at the same time real, tangible — we don’t walk through the station, we fly, calibrating the push-off force to the distance we need to cover. All right, time to sleep. We finished the workday at half past eleven at night, though in reality the day here runs round the clock, with a break for sleep — and even then, while you sleep, your ears are pricked. You spring awake instantly if something changes in the “sound” of the instruments and systems.