The craft’s noise was a miniature orchestra: the whirring of different electrical devices, fans, regenerators, carbon dioxide absorbers and dust filters, gadgets which were never switched off. The noise rattled around him, echoing in this compact metal barrel. It was, he supposed, about as noisy as a busy apartment — with one difference: these were only mechanical sounds; there were no human voices here, save his own.

Once, for an experiment, on the far side of the Moon, he’d turned everything off. Just for a moment. The silence was oppressive: in his ears there was only the susurrus of his own breath, his rushing blood, and beyond that a stillness that stretched a quarter-million miles. It gave him an unwelcome sense of perspective: noise seemed to make the universe more friendly.

Loose objects — pens, paper, food wrappers — swam through the air past his head. They moved languidly in the gentle air currents from the fans, sometimes darting this way and that in the random flow of the air, like improbable fish.

Here, everything floated: dust, pieces of trash, food crumbs, juice drops, coffee, tea. None of it would settle out, and all of it ended up suspended in the air. This enhanced Soyuz was fitted with a jury-rigged air circulation system, and a lot of stuff would end up collected on the intake grille of fan ducts, which he kept covered with cheese cloth. Once a day, he would wrap up the cheese cloth with its assorted trash and replace it with a fresh one.

Most things, if he lost them, ended up on the grille. If he needed something in a hurry he had a little rubber balloon that he kept in his coverall pocket. If he blew this up and released it, it would drift with the prevailing air currents and he could just follow where it went.

If he was thinking about chores, it was time to get up.

He clambered out of his sleeping bag. He started his day with bread, salt and water.

He spent some time cleaning up the Soyuz.

He had some napkins soaked with katamine, a scouring detergent. He wiped down the wall panels, the hand-rails, the door hatches, the control panel surfaces, the crew couches. And, with a little hand-held vacuum, he cleaned all the tough places where dirt built up. He opened up wall panels so he could vacuum the bundles of pipes, cables, fan grilles and heat-exchanger ducts there. When he did that he found a pen he’d lost right after the launch; he tucked it in his pocket, unreasonably pleased at this little triumph.

He had grown used to life in microgravity.