Got up at night to use the toilet, and the ASU system turned out to be overfull — the collection container’s fill sensor had tripped. In short, a problem; there’s nowhere else to go, unless you step outside.

Had to hold it and spent a whole hour pumping urine. In the morning I wanted to sleep, but once I got going I started working. It’s interesting — when you work in the cargo ship, you can feel the person who packed it. One guy tightens a nut so hard the wrench bends in my hands. Another thinks about whoever will have to unscrew it later. So in a hard-to-reach spot — near the shell, next to plumbing or connectors — he’ll leave one slightly loose or skip a bolt entirely, since three bolts are often enough. Of course, in your heart you curse the first guy and feel grateful to the second. You crawl toward a nut, wondering how to get at it, and he’s already thought of you and didn’t crank it down.

From the morning there wasn’t even a chance to go to a porthole. We unloaded the entire cargo ship and started loading it with spent equipment. We’re using it now like a big storage closet in an apartment.

Everything we don’t need goes there, and when the time comes, the cargo ship hauls it all away. Very convenient. It seems like we eat little up here, but when we looked at the empty containers, there were a great many.

You don’t notice how much water you drink either, and the tanks in the “Rodnik” system are nearly empty. We’re now refilling with fresh water.

During lunch, over Africa, I saw a tremendous dust storm that had closed off all visibility, starting from the base of the Horn of Africa, covering the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula and half of the Persian Gulf. The Red Sea is clear only in its northern part; the rest is blanketed by an orange shroud. A fierce wind drives a foaming crest across it, ahead of which billows of sand are racing. You can clearly see how these clouds of the dust storm roll over the coastal rock formations, gradually concealing them in an orange haze. We hadn’t seen a sandstorm this powerful before.

At 12 hours 28 minutes, on orbit 1374 of the station, we passed the thousandth orbit of our flight. We gave an interview to radio correspondents. They asked: “You make many interesting observations — have you made any discoveries?” “Discoveries? We don’t know, but there are interesting things.” I remember when the Popov-Ryumin crew flew, they joked: not a day without discoveries. We live the same way — not a day without discoveries for ourselves, and we make more than one.

For example, until recently we couldn’t imagine what large plankton fields look like in the open ocean. However much we looked at the ocean, we didn’t see them, but now we’ve become convinced they exist as turquoise or greenish patches of enormous extent — up to 100 kilometers — against the blue background of the water. In short, after two months we developed our vision.

Now about geology. At first it seemed the answer was straightforward — look from one or two orbits and confirm whether there’s a fault or not. That seems like all there is. But it turns out that the picture of a given area, if you observe it long enough, changes depending on the season, the orbit, the Sun’s position, and whether you approach the spot from above or below. That is, you keep discovering something new about geological structures and their mapping. We’ve begun not only seeing more details but also learning to trace the main features of structures, pick out their principal lines, and mastering the not-so-simple techniques of Earth observation.

Just yesterday we discovered the auroras for ourselves. We’d heard from the other crews that they exist and are very colorful. But seeing them — it’s fantastical.

From the ground they asked: “Is it like a light show?” No, we couldn’t connect it to a light show at all. It’s a play of light in silence. What’s more, it’s even more powerful. Music makes a light show somehow more real, brings everything closer to you; you feel the connection and the genesis of it all. But when the picture is silent — the blackness of space, the Earth in flashes of lightning, and these enormous pillars and fountains of light, which we’ve called jungles of light — and all of it in silence.

Here you feel that this is beyond your power and you can’t orient yourself in the phenomenon.

Then they gave us a surprise — showed us on television the first results of our work: photographs of the starry sky, the Andromeda Nebula, the Magellanic Clouds, the emission layers of the Earth’s horizon, obtained with “Piramig.” At Mission Control they say they’ve never seen such beauty.

In the next session, radio correspondent Pyotr Pelekhov came on the line again and asked: “Your onboard computer system ‘Delta’ is automating more and more of the work on board — won’t it happen that the cosmonauts will be left with nothing to do?”

I answered: it won’t, because by relieving the cosmonaut, automation thereby frees his mind, time, and capabilities. And the main thing in a person is thought, which gives rise to creative action.

So if automation frees the cosmonaut from operations like station orientation, equipment activation, and many other necessary but tedious operations, he’ll spend more time on research work — what only a human can do.

That’s when we’ll get more results like the ones they just showed us.

“Guys, I notice that in your answers you complement each other well.” “You see, the thing is, in a long-duration expedition crew there should be people who share views and interests, at least in the fundamentals. Because any research task must be done together, and if only one person works, you can miss a lot, run out of time, or in some cases fail to understand. You need to mentally back up each other’s actions. You need overlap, and at the same time it’s important that each person has their own specialty — it makes you reach toward one another.”

In the evening I started filling the drinking water container in the distribution and heating unit from the station’s “Rodnik” tanks, and saw that instead of water only air bubbles were coming out. Frankly, I was scared. I thought I’d mistakenly failed to pump the water from the cargo ship’s tanks into the station’s tanks, and that I’d pumped urine into the cargo ship tanks thinking they were empty. What to do, what now? — 500 liters of water ruined. In horror I began figuring out how this could have happened, and then with enormous relief I realized that everything had been done correctly — it was simply an air lock in the “Rodnik” tank. I pumped out the air and the water flowed.

They shared pleasant news with us — the principal investigators of the French astrophysics experiment “Piramig” proposed that we be co-authors on the scientific papers about its results.

Before bed, the comm operator said that Vitalik and his Chechen friend Umik have returned home from pioneer camp. He says they’re happy, have grown taller, and are tanned.