Woke up at 5 AM and couldn’t believe it was so early. Lay there until 8 o’clock and never fell back asleep. Got up, heavy head; I’m starting to notice that the whites of my eyes are red in the morning, like a rabbit’s. Mood is off. Today is a hard day — many tests of spectral instruments, experiments, visual observations, and so on. In the morning I said to Tolya: “Go have a look — on our garden plot the peas have already sprouted, or while you’re busy studying the fields of Krasnodar Krai, you’ll miss the harvest on your own patch.” “Don’t mix things up,” he says, “that’s biology, not agriculture.” After lunch we did visual observations. I had a good look at the Caspian and the Aral Sea. The beauty of Lake Baikal was stunning — it’s still covered with ice all the way to Barguzin. The Great Lakes in Canada are very similar in water color to Baikal — the same deep blue. When you conduct observations from the transfer compartment and the station is oriented with the docking port toward Earth, the sensation is of standing on the bridge of a sea vessel. You even get the feeling as if the ship’s bow is rising on a wave and the horizon drops away. And there we are, Tolya with binoculars on his chest and I with a sextant from the age of Columbus, continuing to discover and explore the secrets of the Earth across the centuries.

Today the communications operator told us who had been elected to the Komsomol Central Committee at the congress, and a bit later read us Sukhov’s letter to his wife from the film “White Sun of the Desert.” We’d asked him for it so we could write similar letters to our own wives, as a joke. Good man — he doesn’t forget our requests.

June 12, 1982. Baikonur.

Sukhov’s Letter

My soul yearns for you, my dear Katerina Matveyevna, as a crane yearns for the sky. However, we’ve run into a small delay. Three days or so, I reckon, no more, namely: as a conscious fighter, I’ve been assigned to escort a group of comrades from the fraternal East. I should note — the folk gathered are agreeable, one might say warm-hearted, with a spark, so now my legs carry me across the hot sands in the opposite direction, since revolutionary duty so obliges us.

I also wish to report: our deployment is proceeding smoothly, in an atmosphere of fraternal solidarity and accord. We walk across the sands and sigh about nothing except you, my one and only, unforgettable Katerina Matveyevna.

So I advise you not to grieve. That’s a pointless occupation.

I’m writing again, since a free moment has come my way. And I’ve grown tender in the hot sun, like our cat Vaska on the porch. We’re sitting now on the sand by the bluest of seas, experiencing not a care in the world. The sun here is such that your eyes go white.

And I also want to add for you, Katerina Matveyevna, that sometimes such a longing grips my heart, seizes my throat like pincers. You think: how are things with you right now? What are your worries these days? Have you finished the haying, or not yet? The grasses must be rich this year. Well, our separation won’t drag on much longer. I’ll help the group of comrades just a bit more, settle a few little matters, and head your way, my priceless Katerina Matveyevna. And if it should happen that we’re never fated to meet again, Katerina Matveyevna, then know that I was and remain, to my last breath, devoted solely to you. And since I may lie down forever in these sands, I feel a kind of sadness — unaccustomed as I am — or perhaps because the people I’ve been meeting lately have all been warm-hearted, one might even say — delicate. To this I remain a witness. A fighter for the happiness of the working people of the whole world, of the Trans-Caspian International Revolutionary Proletarian Regiment named after Comrade August Bebel, Private Sukhov Fyodor Ivanovich.

In the evening they told us that during our launch there had been much anxiety among the leadership, caused by the fact that when we were saying our farewells, Tolya hadn’t noticed his spacesuit hose catching on the ladder railing, and as he climbed into the elevator, he felt something holding him back and gave a sharp jerk with his body. Everyone saw it and feared the spacesuit’s seal might have been compromised. Only after we completed the spacesuit leak check in the spacecraft and reported that everything was normal did the ground relax and give the go-ahead for launch. And we, up on the rocket, knew nothing about any of this.

Tomorrow we’re expecting the cargo ship. We decided to move equipment we don’t need for now into the transfer compartment, to free up as much space as possible in the work compartment for receiving cargo from Progress, and then to load all the excess hardware left on the station after its orbital insertion — structural mounting elements, packaging, etc. — into Progress and jettison it all together. We decided to stuff the refrigerator behind a panel. It wouldn’t fit, so we started sawing through a partition. Metal shavings floating everywhere, and one got in my eye. We got scared — you could scrub a whole flight that way, might even have to come down. Tolya managed to deftly extract the speck — about a millimeter in size — from my eye right away. In weightlessness this sort of work is dangerous: everything that floats is what we breathe and what flies into our eyes.

During a run on the treadmill, I tried rotating my head while running — an interesting sensation: the head rotates as though it’s separate from the body, there’s no weight, and only the neck connects them. You feel the acceleration as you turn.