a big cat roared. Robin whimpered.

"I w-was only fooling," Charlie said, vaguely understanding that you
could somehow make things happen on this world called Crimson.

But he learned a lesson that night. You could make things happen on
Crimson, but you couldn't unmake them.

The tiger roared again. But they were downwind from it and it went
elsewhere in search of prey. Huddled together near the embers of the
Indian campfire, the two children slept fitfully through the cold night.

Then the three suns finally came up on three different sides of the
horizon. Crimson was deadly, but beautiful....

* * * * *

_Although credit for the discovery of _Aladdin's Planet_ goes to the
explorer Richard Purcell of Earth, two Earth children actually were
shipwrecked there twenty years before Purcell's expedition. But instead
of paving the way for Purcell, they actually made the exploration more
difficult for him. In fact, it was positively fraught with peril. But
since _Aladdin's Planet_ had become the galaxy's arsenal of plenty, it
was well worth Purcell's effort. As any schoolboy knows in this utopia
of 24th century plenty, _Aladdin's Planet_, almost exactly at the heart
of the galaxy, where matter is spontaneously created to sweep out in
long cosmic trails across the galaxy, is the home not merely of
spontaneous creation of matter, but spontaneous _formed_ creation, with
any human psyche capable of doing the handwork of God. A planet of great
import ..._

_--from The ANNALS OF SPACE, Vol. 2_

* * * * *

She stood poised for a glorious moment on the very edge of the rock, the
bronze and pink of her glistening in the sun, the spray still clinging
to her from her last dive. Then, grace in every line of her lithe body,
she sprang from the rock in a perfectly executed swan dive.

Charlie helped her out, smiling. "That was pretty," he said.

"Well, you taught me how." Her figure was not yet that of a woman, but
far more than that of a girl. She was very beautiful and Charlie knew
this although he had no standards to judge by, except for the Indian
women they occasionally saw or Blackbeard's slave girls when the pirate
ship came in to trade.

Unselfconsciously, Robin climbed into her gold-mesh shorts. Charlie
helped her fasten the gold-mesh halter. Long, long ago--it seemed an
unreal dream, almost--he had been a very small boy