It’s 2 AM and we still haven’t gone to bed. Last night we slept little but well. During the day we did medical work. Lyosha and Sveta performed experiments using the “Aelita” medical equipment, while Sasha worked on the “Echograph.” His film got tangled in the cassette; I helped him fix it. I filmed them working with the movie camera. Lyosha and Sveta worked cheerfully. Today she cooked for us. It was nice — homey. As luck would have it, the water distribution and heating unit broke again. Had to swap it out quickly. The guys are hungry; they won’t wait. Sveta is a girl with her own mind. In the evening we started a new experiment, “Tavriya,” on separating biopreparations by electrophoresis into individual fractions (clusters) of homogeneous biological substances at the macromolecular and cellular level. These fractions line up along the separation column like a biological spectrum of the substance, with almost absolutely identical properties in each fraction. This makes it possible to isolate a substance with the needed properties from the total mass. During the work I helped the crew and recorded the experiment on the video recorder.

Before bed we had a laugh. Lyosha was drinking Caucasian souvenir tea from a flask, and that’s not so simple up here — after all, in weightlessness, no matter how you turn the flask, nothing pours out. But he adapted: he’d put the flask neck in his mouth, jump up, and sharply squat down. Whatever got into his mouth we called one “glug.” His glug turned out to be several times bigger than ours. Lyosha executed these jumps with real flair, and sometimes a huge drop of whatever he was drinking would hang on his nose. Wrinkling his face comically, since it stung his nose, he’d drink it up by stretching out his lips and sucking it in. Sasha proposed another method, using the wetting property of liquids. He’d dip a spoon into the flask and suck the contents along it. At night, before bed, we stamped commemorative envelopes with the ship’s postal stamp. Now everyone’s asleep. I look at them — Lyosha lies facing me, and Sveta’s arm has fallen out of the sleeping bag and hangs in the air.