Medical day. I lay down to sleep and thought of my family, how I’d walk through the door, and tears streamed from my eyes. The longing must be catching up with me. Another month and a half to go. Today our instructor reported that our error coefficient — the ratio of mistakes to flight time — is 0.27, one of the best.

I planted the garden. Up here it’s not so simple — seeds fly away when you try to take them out of the pouch and place them in the artificial soil. I came up with a trick: I took a bandage from the med kit, moistened it, dipped it into the seed pouch — the seeds stuck — and then rolled little cigarette-shapes and pressed them into the soil layers with tweezers.

Again we ran a test of the “Korund” process furnace, and again a malfunction — the shaft of the capsule-ejection mechanism jammed, and the motor overheated; spit on it and it would sizzle. Good thing Tolya felt the heat in time, touched it, and burned himself.

During the comm session I went off on the specialist for this experiment and apparently hurt the guy’s feelings. I felt bad about it. The shift leader did apologize afterward for all the trouble Korund causes us. Then he offered to read an article from Komsomolskaya Pravda about Yashchenko, which mentioned how he and I were both patients at the traumatology institute. As fate would have it, Volodya Yashchenko was stopped by a leg injury before the Olympics, and I was stopped a month before launch. I remember when they brought him into the ward, I said: “Volodya, no moping — we’ll get back on our feet, and let’s set a record to spite fate — you on Earth, and I in space.” The article reminded me of that, and I asked them to send him a telegram: “Volodya, I’m going for the record — when’s yours?”

And actually it was good there, at CITO, even if painful — it was fun. In the sports ward there were guys and girls from every kind of sport, from ballet. All wrapped in casts on a leg, an arm, or the neck, and the recovering ones looked after those fresh out of surgery. Ward doors open, everyone together. In the evenings, after the doctors left, they’d hold performances in the long corridor that put tightrope walking to shame. One fellow would walk the entire corridor on his hands with a bandaged leg, another would do a handstand on crutches; they raced in wheelchairs. Jokes, stories, pranks. Here you couldn’t — were embarrassed to — show your pain or bad mood. Everyone endured. And during the day, the tedious, grueling rehab sessions for the injured limbs. The mechanotherapy alone — forced bending of the knee under a weight — was a school of endurance. They even made a photo-gazette titled “Abortion of Fate,” which at first embarrassed Professor Mironova, head of the sports-injury department, but then she accepted the convalescent humor and allowed it to be hung up for all to see. Of course, each of us had had our plans wrecked by injury, so we pictured our fate as a ship that had struck the rocks, and we’d ended up in a raging ocean, with the doctors — each one’s surgeon — throwing us life preservers.