Sleeping poorly, sleep is shallow, like half-dozing — you remember everything, but I got up and my head didn’t ache. Got quite cold during the night. In the morning I floated over to the instrument panel, looked — temperature 18 degrees — and switched on heating fans one and four. Took my toilet. Tolya got up; I asked him: “How did you sleep?” He says he sleeps poorly too and got cold. We went on comm; today is a demanding day — two orbit corrections using the cargo ship. We’ll be lowering the orbit to 300 km for the rendezvous with the French, and right now our orbital altitude is 350 km.
The correction went well; the cargo ship engine ignited softly — the acceleration was gentle, since it was braking the entire stack: station plus our transport ship. We watched the g-force on the Palekh matryoshka doll we’d brought as a souvenir for the French cosmonaut. Before the engine fired, we “placed” it, if you can say that, in front of us in the air. When the engine fired, our matryoshka, smoothly picking up speed, flew toward us into the scientific equipment compartment. Behind it, a film camera and a gas mask flew out of the transfer compartment and hit Tolya on the head — he actually yelped. We laughed. Everything went smoothly. Right now we’re passing over the Kuril Islands; they stretch out in a thin line to the south. The panorama of the cloud cover over the volcanic peaks, dusted with snow, has something northern, cold about it. The clouds look like enormous white bear pelts with a grayish tint. There were also white-and-black clouds. That’s the texture of tiny clouds merged into one big cloud, and the dark color is the ocean water showing through the gaps. The austere, cold look of these clouds is very beautiful — it seems like they want to blanket the earth with their enormous bodies. We caught a bit of Kamchatka — many volcanoes visible. A fairytale, majestic sight — this long-range artillery of the Earth’s depths. They stand on the Earth like pyramids, pointing their muzzles at the sky, with many facets on their slopes beautifully highlighted by snow.
We had lunch. Mood is good; we joke and say what bliss it is in space: the buffet is open round the clock, though the kitchen does have breaks. We only manage to do exercise once a day — either during the day or in the evening — because there’s so much work. Unfortunately, the ground can’t do anything to lighten our load, and we ourselves don’t really want that. During exercises, instead of music from the tape player, we listened to Kozlov’s lectures on geology: very interesting and useful to have a course of lectures on tape.
Today Comrade Gustav Husak visited Mission Control, listened to our communication session, but didn’t come on the comm with us. He sent us greetings and congratulations; we sent a reply radiogram: “Dear Comrade Gustav Husak! Thank you for the congratulations. It was a pleasure to receive them aboard the Salyut-7 orbital complex. We wish you good health and success in your great work of state for the benefit of the Czechoslovak people and the Soviet-Czechoslovak fraternal socialist community. Crew: Berezovoy, Lebedev.”
Right now I was sunbathing: it’s interesting — my face over the Canary Islands, my body over Africa. I admired the sunset over the Indian Ocean; we entered shadow over Madagascar and met the sunrise over America.
We made a sign: “Buffet open round the clock — help yourself.” In the evening a radiogram came: test the connector of the pressure equalization valve for the large cavity of the docking port with a multimeter. I put on the multimeter — turns out the batteries were dead. Had to assemble batteries from mercury-zinc cells available on board. Connected them to the multimeter and tested the circuit. My face is burning; I looked in the mirror and it’s red: I overdid it in the sun on an African beach. Well well, time to sleep.