Today is the day we undock from the cargo ship. In any profession, especially ours, confidence should be tempered with doubt. We woke up three times again, but my head doesn’t ache. Got up at 7:40, and at 7:42 came the start of dynamics — the orientation engines firing. We leaped up and, still in our underwear, began controlling the station. At 9 AM we undocked from the cargo ship. I watched and filmed its departure.

It drifted away slowly, propelled by the spring pushers and engines. There was a feeling of complete hopelessness about it — a lifeless ship hanging limply, rotating with residual velocities against the blackness of space, and then against the backdrop of the passing Earth.

At that time we conducted measurements with the “Astra” instrument of certain characteristics of the gas cloud around the station. This atmosphere is held near it just as around any planet, but how it behaves and distributes itself is still not understood. It depends on the station’s configuration, how many ships are in the stack, the materials of the coatings, the types of fuel, and the dynamics of motion. A paradox: in creating space technology to go beyond the atmosphere, no one even imagined that artificial spacecraft, under the influence of space, would themselves become captive to their own atmosphere. Thus a new problem arose and the need to understand it, in order to fully use the conditions of space for research and observation.

Today, in orbital orientation, I managed to observe a lot of the Earth. Unfortunately, we fly over Soviet territory very early, when we should be sleeping, and during the day we barely catch it. After lunch we ran test checks of “Delta” programs (orientation maneuvers on MOG gyroscopes); I had to issue a shutdown command because the rotation around the Y axis wasn’t being cancelled. The ground said we’d acted correctly.

Suddenly the ground asks us to prepare the cargo ship for hatch closure, but doesn’t adjust the day’s program, and we find ourselves in a difficult position — we start scrambling because additional work has been piled on top of the main work. It would seem so simple for the ground — take away some work or move an experiment to another day; don’t put the crew in a position where they have to either rush through the work or ask for a lighter load. After all, Mission Control has the legislative right and authority to change the program, but it’s easier for them to put everything on the crew. I kept my composure, but my mood was sour. Our crew physician Zhenya Kobzev sensed this, and in the evening comm session he says: “Wait a moment” — and suddenly I heard a very familiar Ukrainian melody, but couldn’t figure out where it was from, and then I realized it was my son playing the piano. It was so wonderful that tears sprang to my eyes from the surprise. At the end he stumbled and said: “Papa, I’m sorry, I wish you and Uncle Tolya a good flight” — and I heard him shout: “Mom, I’m going outside to play.” The comm session ended on that note. Well done, Zhenya, thank you for the recording.

I had a good workout on the treadmill. Ran to music. I noticed that if the music is rhythmic, running is easier, especially to Vysotsky’s songs. I sweated buckets, as they say. It’s interesting — when you relax your arms, they float upward; apparently that’s the position of true muscle relaxation, so the arms rise up as if in water. Hanging in the air, I tried to move with a jerk — no displacement, since there’s no reaction force from contact with the external environment — it’s the same as trying to lift yourself by your own hair. But you can rotate around any body axis, with coordinated, precise fixing of your position at turns of 90, 180, or 360 degrees. Here a different mechanism is at work — the inertial forces of body parts act depending on how fast you rotate your arm, leg, or torso.

Today I looked at South America — the continent, islands, rivers. What happiness it is to see so much that’s interesting on the Earth. How breathtakingly beautiful it is — and there are people down there, just like us, only belonging to a different tribe. And suddenly I so wanted to descend to one of those islands and see how they live, to spend time with them.

The peas have already grown to 29 cm; tendrils have appeared at the tips — single and forked, like slingshots. The stems all reach upward, just as on Earth; the leaves in the upper part are healthy but have a white coating like mildew. In the second vessel, on the leaves close to the soil at about 5 cm height, there’s a brown coating; roots have emerged on the surface, white. There are also tiny leaves right at the soil. The tallest stem has 23 leaves and 6 branches.

Near Naples we saw an American carrier group. I continued my investigations into the possibility of controlling body movement in weightlessness. I hung in the air as if in water, lay on my back, and started pedaling an imaginary bicycle forward and backward — no translational movement. But as soon as you kick your legs as in the crawl stroke, rotating around the longitudinal axis of your body, you rotate freely.

A forward or backward somersault is easy; a single swing of the arms provides enough energy for only about a 40-degree turn. And if you swing your arms like windmill blades, you rotate, but with pauses after each swing.

The water heater and dispenser unit is acting up. You fill the food packets with water, and the taps leak. The water drops that form are amazing — a sphere of water, and inside it an air bubble, and inside that another tiny ball of water.

Beautiful to look at — almost makes you not want to fix it — except you have to eat. I thought that, probably, one’s world remains interesting only so long as one can be surprised. I prepared buckwheat porridge, but it turned out to be not so easy to eat. If you don’t moisten it enough with water in the packet, then after you open it and scoop with a spoon, it scatters in a fan, and you have to swim around like a fish in an aquarium, catching it with your mouth, and everything you miss flies off and collects on the ventilator grilles.