Thoughts kept crowding in all night. Fell asleep right away but woke at 2 AM and couldn’t sleep until 4:30. Just had breakfast and lay down briefly before the experiment.
The medical experiment M-2 (electrocardiographic study of cardiac activity under physical loads) showed parameters approaching their pre-flight baseline values.
Resting pulse 84, after load 150, five minutes’ rest 100 bpm.
The ground read out the awards. Volodya and Sasha received the Commander grade of the Legion of Honor, while we and Jean-Loup Chretien received the Officer grade. They also sent us a radiogram on the order’s history.
Curiously, Louis XVIII, who replaced Napoleon and dismantled many of his innovations, preserved the Legion of Honor in its original form. The head of the order as an organization is the President of France, assisted by the Grand Chancellor. The Legion of Honor is a very high distinction for the French. To earn it in peacetime, a French citizen must serve for 20-25 years. The order has five ranks of legionnaire: the two highest — Grand Cross and Grand Officer — are conferred only upon the president and senior civil and military leaders, followed by Commander, Officer, and Knight. French citizens cannot skip ranks. So Chretien’s Officer grade was an exception; normally he’d have needed 8 years as a Knight first.
I observed the Aral region again. I’m developing the impression that the Southern Ural range extends to the Caspian. The spotted structure, as I call it, is like a cross-section of mountains — over centuries, softer rocks weathered away while the hard bedrock remained, like a scar. It starts from the Buzachi Peninsula and runs in dark ridges straight eastward, then becomes a spotted mountainous structure joining the Southern Urals north of the Aral Sea.
Our visiting crew and their backups, including the second French cosmonaut Patrick Baudry, came on comm. We congratulated them on the good landing. We asked: aren’t you bored on Earth? Come back — it’s calmer here and the work is more interesting. “That’s true,” they answer, laughing. Jean-Loup says he often thinks of how we worked together, how we approached the work, and that was the most satisfying thing. “I see you’ve got much better order on the station since we left — sorry for the mess we made.”
He asked us to look for his wedding ring, which had floated away. He says if we find it, he’ll give it to us.
— That’s not so easy, Jean, — I answer. — But if we find it, we’ll bring it back to you as a souvenir, along with Volodya Dzhanibekov’s watch, which he also lost. They haven’t turned up yet.
Then the crew told us about their press conference, at which Academician Alexandrov noted that the Soviet-French program was carried out superbly thanks to our teamwork. Jean-Loup and Patrick were given hunting rifles at the Academy of Sciences. By the end of the day my head ached from poor sleep. I went to a corner, wedged myself in, relaxed, trying to doze. But no — if you hang freely in the air, you’re constantly controlling yourself internally, since you’ll be flipped over, carried somewhere slowly, drift upward, and so on. Your consciousness doesn’t switch off. So I started looking for a corner to wedge into and be fixed in place. I floated behind the shower enclosure, and the moment I felt my position was stable, it became easier to rest, because I switched off and stopped monitoring my body’s position. I compared this to how a fish in water seeks a spot under a snag or stone to rest. Possibly for the same reasons.