Day off. In the morning we assembled the video recorder. Wonderful. Now we can live. Raikin. Vysotsky. Variety shows. “Nu, pogodi!” It’s just a shame the tapes are only 20 minutes. That’s inconvenient up here. Rolan Bykov came on to congratulate us on the EVA. He says he watched with his whole family as we worked in open space and was full of admiration. He told a funny episode from the filming of “Dead Season.” Then there was a meeting with Vladimir Shainsky. Together with him and TsUP we had a good sing-along of “It’s Fun to Walk Together…”

We stowed Tolya’s spacesuit, the regenerators, the absorbers. Things got a bit roomier. Today I took out the list of what needs to be photographed for the book “Geography from Space” that I want to write after returning. We all have a good picture of the Earth’s geography from school textbooks and maps (continents, seas, straits, mountains, rivers, their colors), and I want to show people how all these familiar things look unfamiliar, and sometimes extraordinary, from space. I photographed Lake Titicaca in South America. It spread out as a blue sheet of water about 40-50 kilometers wide and 150 km long, with small light-green lines along the shore on a reddish mountain plateau pockmarked by geysers and volcanoes, with numerous traces of them in the form of brown spots of ring-shaped crater structures and cones. To its south, on the same background and of almost the same size, lies Lake Poopo, and farther south you can see a huge white spot of a salt lake with jagged shorelines. So the beginning has been made.

Today they told us that a one-hour film about our flight is being planned, and asked us to do more interior shots of life on board. In the evening, after work, the guys from Mission Control asked us to tell them something else interesting about how the EVA went. We happily recalled two moments with Tolya. How there was a little draft when we opened the exit hatch and all the dust from the compartment, like a snow flurry, glittering in the Sun’s rays, was sucked out into space. What Tolya remembered most was the warm sunshine of space, very warm, like in the south. What struck me was the bright white light from the Sun, as on a frosty day, and another moment surprised me, involving the lens cap of the television camera. I needed to remove it from the lens and fasten it to the side of the TV camera body with a Velcro strip. I couldn’t manage it for a long time. I kept trying to complete this operation because I was afraid that if I left the cap unsecured and moved to my work area, it might blow onto the lens and block its field of view. Without having fastened it, I began working, and 2.5 hours later, when I was entering the station and putting away the television camera, I noticed that the cap, just as I had left it, was still hanging there as if rooted in place, not having changed its position at all. This was surprising, because what I saw didn’t match my internal perception of the situation. The thing is, I subconsciously associated speed (it was about 8 km/sec) with the earthly concept of motion, relative to the Earth and to the air. But here we’re moving in a vacuum, and there is no airflow, yet the awareness that there should be one at such speed prevented me from leaving the lens cap alone after simply removing it. This memory stereotype can be compared to a stopped escalator in the metro. When we step onto it, we see that it’s motionless, but the internal awareness that its normal state is movement kicks in, and we unconsciously make an anticipatory acceleration in the direction of the escalator.

Another thing that struck me was that the station stands so incredibly steady, like a monolith, like a building. And when I stepped out onto the “Yakor” platform, the feeling was as if I were standing on a balcony of a high-rise building. You stand in place, you look, and everything around you moves — the Earth, the stars — and you feel no contact with Earth. You see only an enormous sphere with recognizable geography — continents, seas, oceans in color, and the blue halo of the atmosphere transitioning into the blackness of space. You don’t perceive the altitude, though you know it’s great, since we’re flying in airless space. But still in the Earth’s field. Near the station you feel calm, but the intensity of impressions grows the farther you move away from it. It’s like at the edge of a balcony — the more you lean out, the stronger the sensation of height and the possibility of falling to Earth. But here the fear of falling is different — not of falling but of drifting away from the station and getting lost in space. Tolya says: “I’m sorry I didn’t experience that, but I understand the intensity of Valentin’s sensations.”

Listening to jazz music today, I noticed that after a while it tires and irritates. This is probably because it doesn’t stir, doesn’t touch those feelings connected with our everyday life. Jazz music is too festive for life with its mundane worries; in it I see more for young people, who strive to have their own world, consonant with their age: restless, stormy, impulsive, searching, understood only by them, monopolistic, so as not to be dependent on the teachings and imposed opinions of the older generation. But the young tribe eventually crosses the Rubicon of youth, and true art — classical, folk — only it gives peace, and from that, pleasure. And the passions of youth are pleasant to recall, but only briefly, and all the more so, the passions of a new generation are filtered through the prism of one’s own youthful and mature years. And the new is perceived with interest only as a contemporary person, and sometimes with skepticism and even sarcasm, that all this is passing and, in any case, not better than what was in your time.

The soul rests when you listen to Russian melodies, tangos, foxtrots. Or romances performed by Ruslanova, Shtokolov, Kobzon. They awaken warm feelings and don’t interfere with thoughts.