Got up half-wrecked, though the headache passed. Removed and disassembled pump NOK-3. Turns out the bearing failed, as we had suspected. A month ago we told the ground we didn’t like the grinding noise in the pump when it kicked on for condensate pumping, but they reassured us — nothing serious, it’s bedding in. So it “bedded in” until the bearing cage fell apart. Ryumin came on comm; we discussed the situation. “You want to fly and make no mistakes? That doesn’t happen — and these are minor things.”

During the day we met with the families. Yevgeny Fyodorovich came — a professor at MAI and the scientific adviser of my candidate’s dissertation, a great friend of our family — along with Gena, my friend from the Komsomol Central Committee. We talked well. Lyusya is doing a great job bringing friends, though she seems more constrained to me. Gena read his poems — not bad. Vitalka spoke well with me today. Lyusya says he has a bent for the humanities. Some thing to cheer me up with. I still hope he’ll go into engineering. When our odyssey is over, I need to spend time with my son, or with his mother he’ll go no further than the humanities. As we leave the zone, we hear our children shouting in relay: “Goodbye, goodbye, see you soon.” And now they’ve run off to the TsUP cafeteria — they enjoy it so much that sometimes they’re late for the next session, and we hear their mothers calling them.

When will the sun come out — my soul has been overcast for a while. But I’ll say this: to fly five months and keep good relations with the ground and within the crew is no simple matter. So everything is normal.

We did a TV broadcast dedicated to November 7th. Today the head of the medical group came on comm and said our request about where to rest was granted. I asked for the “Lekani” sanatorium in Borzhomi, and Tolya chose Kislovodsk. Before bed we prepared the spacesuit for mothballing. Tolya says: “I want to sleep.”

“Go to bed,” I say. “I’ll do it.” I stayed.