Nick wanted to find home. He wanted Earth.

He couldn't figure out how to ask, though. He played with the map function on his phone. He made drawings. He drew the dungeon, and then an arrow from that to a spot on a big circle for BigBall, and put a little circle going around it for Rudolph. Then he drew the whole thing going around the Death Star.

Petra didn't get it. Nick was surprised. He would have thought it was easy. He tried to think of other ways to get it across.

He tried to draw a globe, then drew it over again in a few different positions to show it turning. At some point it must have clicked, because Petra made a 3D visual of a sphere with markings like he had been trying to draw, and then started rotating it. “Yes! Good job, Petra!” Nick cheered the alien device.

He counted about eight seconds for the image to rotate once, and wrote that in. When nothing seemed to change, he edited the number and made it four seconds. As soon as he did that, the sphere started rotating twice as fast. Now we're cooking. Nick edited again, and this time put in the fourteen hours and twenty minutes he had estimated for a day on BigBall.

Then Petra changed the time, to fourteen hours, seventeen minutes and eleven seconds. There we go. Petra knew better than he did what the exact length was of a day on Planet BigBall. And now she had told him.

Nick used the Rangefinder menu option and asked the radius of BigBall. Petra responded immediately with 612344208 cm. Most of the digits were white on black background, like usual, but the second to last looked slightly green and the last 8 was bright green. Nick frowned. What's that, how fuzzy it is?

How far is that in miles? It turned out to be around 3800 miles, which sounded right. Nick took a couple of notes.

Now that he was dealing with moving things, Nick drew a smaller ball near BigBall, then started it orbiting. He was pretty sure that Rudolph's ...Nick didn't know the word. The time it took Rudolph to go around BigBall once. Anyway, he was pretty sure that it took Rudolph about 8 hours, so he put that in.

As usual, Petra cleaned up his artwork and shifted lines to put everything in scale. Thought so. Rudolph is a lot smaller than the Moon. Nick put a circle for the Death Star, then indicated that BigBall should go around it. He labeled it with a time, then typed in 200 days.

The number immediately changed to 325 days 11 hours 16 minutes 08 seconds.

Something was flashing in the display. The Death Star was a tiny ball, and BigBall was a dot. There were also four otherdots, and Nick realized that those were other planets. Petra displayed times for those as well. The shortest was 113 days and the longest was 44 years. Nick had no idea whether that was normal or not, but it was what he needed.

Nick started drawing Earth.

He did it as slowly and carefully as he could. He really didn't remember the shape of Asia all that well, and he knew he was getting details wrong in Europe. After a while, he started changing the color of his drawing to light green when he was sort of confident and bright green when he was mostly guessing. But he put the day as 24 hours and the year as 365 days and 6 hours, but he put the 6 hours in light green. It took him a few tries working it through before he got confident that that did leap years right.

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Then he drew the solar system. He didn't know any numbers, but he knew it was four little planets and then four big ones, and Earth was third from the sun. Then he remembered to draw the Moon, and put it as 28 days or so, but wasn't sure what to put for how fast it rotated. For the moment he put zero.

He dredged his memory for every bit of astronomy trivia he'd ever noticed, from movies and TV and books and long-forgotten classes. Eventually he ran out of things to add. Then Petra started asking questions, and teased a few more numbers out of his memory. He'd forgotten that a Mars year was something close to 2 Earth years.

A weird detail was when Petra put a slider control on the Sun. Nick played with it, and the Sun actually changed color. Oh, I get it. Stars are different colors, and if I make a good match that will narrow it down a lot. He squinted, got it close, zoomed in with the slider and kept tweaking it tiny bits, trying to get it perfect. Finally he couldn't get it any better and left it alone.

Petra added another slider to the Sun. This one was labeled “Element 1” on one end, and “Element 2” on the other end. Nick wasn't sure about that one so he left it in the middle.

Then, Petra added yet another slider. This one made the sun break out in sunspots. Nick took his best guess, but he remembered that sometimes the Sun was quieter than others, on a cycle. Eleven years, maybe? He vaguely recalled a reference to it in a science fiction series he read once. So Nick added a label and put “11 years”, then slid the sunspot marker back and forth.

Then Petra started quizzing him about the Earth. He listed the air as about 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen, roughly the size of the ice caps, and that the oceans covered about 70% of the surface. Petra asked him for how much Earth was tilted, next.

Nick squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, wait, I know this, I know I know this...Tropicana something? No. Twenty-two degrees? Twenty three degrees? Something like that?” He knew it had something to do with how wide the tropics were, and vaguely remembered the latitude from his trip to Florida one eventful spring break a few years back.

It felt like a super-hard version of Thursday Trivia Night at Pete's Pub. He kept thinking he was totally done, but Petra would point out that he hadn't mentioned that Mars was red or something.

He did learn one interesting thing from Petra: she only seemed to know about the Milky Way, not other galaxies. As soon as he tried to draw it, Petra gave him a really nice map of the whole thing, and a bunch of stats listed. There was a really absurd number of digits in the size in centimeters. Nick had no idea how to figure out a light year, but he remembered a song about it in a British comedy movie, something about “100,000 light-years side to side.” So he marked one end of the galaxy, then the other end, and added a label, “100,000 years,” and let Petra figure the rest out for herself.

Petra put a slider on the galaxy, which he found stood for the distance from the center of the galaxy. I have no idea. We're not in the center, and we're not on the edge. Call it halfway. He made sure to mark in green that he was very unsure.

Finally, Nick asked, Where is Earth?

Petra displayed her process in answering:

Calculating...

Stars in Milky Way Galaxy: 412,325,600,292

Distance from galaxy center: 137,224,553,201

Star Color: 10,154,616,281

Exact star color: 1,003,218,887

Percent black on star: 436,221,554

Time black on star: 21,554,202

Nine planets: 1,345,299

Sequence of planet sizes: 645,038

Water on Planet 3: 222,516

Moon size: 1,342

Planet 4 color: 688

Planet 6 biggest rings: 146

Nick's Phone: 1

Planet Earth found.