We overslept; the ground woke us. The final day of EVA preparation. Last radiograms. We refined the EVA timeline down to the minute. Hatch opening at 5:24 AM. Closing at 7:23 AM — meaning 1 hour and 59 minutes in open space. That’s more than one orbit around the Earth. I remember, during my first flight on “Soyuz-13,” looking out the porthole at the Earth, I had an enormous desire to go outside and stretch out above the planet. It took me a long time to reach the fulfillment of that dream. Nine years, five of them in direct training as part of four primary expedition crews. Hundreds of grueling hours on trainers, in pressure chambers, airplanes, underwater, classes at facilities, dozens upon dozens of exams. So many worries, so much sweat wrung out over those years. And now it’s hard to believe the day is approaching. For its sake, years of hard training were worth enduring. Today we calculated: of all Soviet cosmonauts, only nine have participated in EVA operations, and Tolya and I have also been given the chance to experience this and do such interesting work.

All day we prepare the orbital module of the transport ship, the transfer compartment, assemble, check, and double-check the equipment. We load fresh CO2 absorbers into the spacesuits, get the still camera and movie camera ready. The thing is, filming is not in the program, since there’s no special pressure housing for the movie camera as there is for the still camera, to work in vacuum. But I’m convinced that nothing will happen to the film. The emulsion will hold, and there shouldn’t be a film-advance jam — which I verified in a vacuum chamber on the ground — and for thermal protection we made a sleeve from insulating fabric. So if the filming goes well, we’ll get unique movie footage of the EVA. Another problem is the light filter.

We fastened it to the lens around its edge with ordinary blue adhesive tape. I wonder whether the internal pressure between the lens and the filter might peel off the tape, so I made notches in it to equalize pressure. We’ll see what happens with the adhesive tape. That’s an experiment too.

Talking with Tolya about working in open space, we wondered about the dynamics of moving away from the station on the tether. We decided to model it all inside the station. I took a tether, tied it to my coverall, pushed off from the wall, and floated smoothly along the compartment.

When I reached the tether’s full length, its tension gave me a return pull and I began slowly rotating. I couldn’t stop the rotation, so I asked Tolya, who held the other end, to give the tether a little jerk. After that the rotation stopped and slowly a rotation in another plane began — meaning that by gently tugging the tether you can change the rotation axis and damp it out.

Then Tolya started pulling me toward him by the tether. It seemed I should drift toward him in a straight line, but instead I was deflected and ended up against the wall — the most unpleasant outcome, because in real conditions you could float onto a solar panel or antenna and snag yourself. We started over. This time I asked him to only take up the slack and not pull, while I propelled myself along the tether with gentle hand-over-hand pulls. That worked much better. I moved in a directed fashion. In general, our experiments showed that drifting away from the station on a tether is unjustifiably dangerous when you have no means of controlling your body’s orientation.

I remember Vitalik asking me, when I took him to watch a training session in the hydro facility: “Papa, what if you come out of the station into space and suddenly break loose — what happens?” I said: “That can’t happen, son, because I’m connected to the station by a strong tether that carries electrical power for the suit’s fans and control panel, and we also communicate with the ground and each other through it. On top of that, we’re clipped to the handrails running along the station by a 0.7-meter safety tether, like a leash, and we also hold the handrails with our hands — so it’s a triple safety system.” “Okay,” he says, “but what if you did break loose — would you die right away?” “If you did, nobody would catch you and nobody would hear you. For several hours you’d be a living satellite of the Earth, and then the oxygen would run out. That’s all.”

Today we received a lot of radiograms again. The ground is nervous, just like during the Soviet-French expedition. Right now I’m lying in the transfer compartment on my inanimate brother — the spacesuit, my shell in open space — writing these lines. The wheat has sprouted well, risen to about 20 cm, thin and delicate, swaying under the airflow from the fans as if in a field breeze. The peas are sprouting sturdily on thick, well-fed stems, reluctantly raising their buds of curled leaves. Yesterday, when I was watering them with the hose, a drop of water broke free and, as a transparent sphere, caught between two wheat stalks, and in the center of the droplet-sphere an air bubble formed a tiny diamond. Beautiful. Only in space can you see something like that. Time to sleep now.