Slept like the dead. Woke up feeling wonderful. In my dream I heard a communication session — voices — started listening closely and woke up. It was Tolya already talking with the ground. It was 8:45.

Without getting dressed — as we often do in the mornings — I floated to station post one and got on comm. A medical day. Wall-to-wall experiments today. So far so good. Medicine is only a distraction, especially on Earth. You can’t always say that out loud; we have too many wonderful specialists, people devoted to their work. But there are people who merely speak the medical language, without concrete deeds. I’d call them the ones standing at the front entrance of medicine. They’ll hand you a glass of water, flash by at the right moment in a white coat, show concern for your health in public in front of the bosses, propose projects about strengthening health — but it’s all just sounds they revel in, relishing their imaginary participation in the great cause.

Nasty little people, and they’re not only found in medicine! Anger wells up when you see and hear their kind, and there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s how a medical day turned into a treatise.

Today we worked with “Delta” in mode 80 for calculating observation point coordinates. In the evening Savchenko came on comm and lobbed another puzzle about the sextant. After the session we took a station flashlight, placed it about three meters from the sextant and one meter below its axis. We started changing the “Delta-one” setting. The flashlight entered the sextant’s field of view at the 5 o’clock position at a setting of 90 degrees, and at 180 degrees it moved in an arc up to the 11 o’clock position. Then we placed the flashlight one meter above the sextant axis and started entering “Delta-two.” The flashlight entered the field of view at 1 o’clock and moved down to 8 o’clock. We transmitted this data to the ground — let them sort it out.