Didn’t sleep all night. Heart palpitations. How impressionable I am. Got up early, started unloading the cargo ship. They packed it well this time.

So, I open the hatch, look for mail, and there are no letters from Lyusya. Only one letter for Tolya, and an old one at that, from June 28. I was upset — I’d been so hoping for word from home. We asked the ground where they’d put them; they said the letters were in container No. 8, at the bottom of the cargo ship. They probably buried them on purpose so we’d finish unloading faster. To the music from Earth — “Ryabina Kudryavaya” and “Apple and Pear Trees Were Blooming” — we started unloading at full speed. By evening we reached container No. 8, having nearly emptied the entire Progress, but the letters weren’t there either.

Before bed, upset, we drank some tea and had apples. Lyusya sent Tula gingerbread, each one inscribed with kind wishes. We ate tomatoes; they sent a lemon. The treadmill felt good today. Vestibular sensations in weightlessness are interesting — you turn your head, stimulating the vestibular system, but when you stop, there’s no illusion of spinning. You halt as if rooted, with no vestibular aftereffects. After repairs we started up “Oasis”; we were pleased ourselves at how well the unit works. We loaded seed cartridges of crepis, arabidopsis, and flax into the Biogravistat. Some seeds on the stationary disk, others on the rotating one, to determine the sensitivity of germinating plants to g-loads.

The control seeds will germinate in weightlessness on the stationary disk, while the others grow under acceleration equal to Earth’s gravity, created by the disk’s rotation. From talking with the biologists, we learned — and were surprised — that the sensitivity of plant cells to gravity is extraordinarily high, equal to one ten-thousandth of Earth’s gravitational acceleration.

In the North Atlantic we saw a large plankton field 200 by 100 km. We talked with an oceanologist; he said our plankton data for the North Atlantic is being verified by the vessel “Langust.” The fishermen thank us and are enrolling us in their crew. They asked us to mark the coordinates of all plankton fields on the ocean observation map from previous expeditions on “Salyut-6.”

At night I worked with the PSN camera, photographing the aurora. This time the picture was less grand, but with more crimson.

Time to sleep.