him.

Two hours after the tiny model spaceship landed on a planet with three suns in the sky, Robin Sinclair awoke. She felt cramped and uncomfortable. It took her a while to orient herself. She had some kind of a dream. A dream was a funny thing. Mom said it wasn't real. But it sure was real to her.

She got up and pushed with her hands. A section of the tiny spaceship sprang away at her touch, admitting blinding light. She lay there with her eyes tightly shut, but after a while she could see. The boy was sleeping. She still hated him. He was sleeping with her doll in his arms. She took the doll and he moved his arms and woke up. She jumped out of the open spaceship with the doll and started running.

She ran along a beach. But the sand was green. The ocean hissed and roared and there was nobody else. "N'ya! N'ya! Y'can't catch me!" she bawled at the top of her voice. And fell down in the sand.

He caught up with her and fell on top of her and they wrestled for the doll. The surf thundered nearby. The tide, capricious in the grip of the three suns, rose suddenly, flooding them with chill water. Coughing and spluttering and choking, they retreated further up the beach.

Soon they quieted down.

"I'm soaking wet," she said.

"My name is Charlie," he said sullenly. "Let's go back now."

"How do we go back?" she wanted to know.

"That's a nice doll," Charlie said.

"You took it from me!" Accusingly.

"Aw, I only wanted to look at it."

"She has a crimson dress and everything."

"This is some world," Charlie said after a while.

"What's a world?"

"Oh, a world is—you know—everything."

"Oh."

"You think it has Indians?"

She said, "It ought to have Indians, anyhow."

"And pirates too?" he asked in a voice full of awe.

She nodded her head very seriously. "I like pirates," she said. "They're so scarey."

Just then a ship came into view far away across the water. It had enormous sails and a black hull. On the fore-sail was painted a huge black skull.

"Let's get out of here!" Charlie cried in alarm. But beetling cliffs reared behind the beach and although they ran frantically along at the edge of the green sand, they could find no way to scale the cliffs. The pirate ship came closer and closer.

They got down whimpering at the base of the cliffs and remained very still. After a long time the pirate ship came close to shore. A longboat was dispatched and its oars flashed in the triple sunlight like giant legs on which the longboat walked across the waves toward the beach.

Then the pirates were ashore. The man who led them had only one leg, and a peg. He looked very mean.

"It's Blackbeard the Pirate!" said Charlie in a frightened whisper. His Dad had once read him a story about Blackbeard.

The pirate with the wooden leg suddenly had a black beard.

"The doll!" cried Robin.

"What's the matter?"

"We left her down there. Crimson." She called her doll Crimson because she had a crimson dress.

Now Blackbeard approached the model spaceship with his crew. They gathered around it, frowning. Robin watched, her face pale, her eyes wide. Crimson was there on the sand. They were going to see Crimson. Even as she was thinking these horrible thoughts, one of the pirates saw Crimson and picked her up. Blackbeard came over and took the doll and looked at her. At that moment there was a shout from above the cliffs and an arrow suddenly transfixed one of the pirates. He fell down writhing and Blackbeard and the rest of his men raced back to the longboat.

"Indians," Charlie whispered knowingly.

The Indians shouted and yelled.

"Are there any cowboys here?" Robin asked hopefully.

"No, sir. No cowboys," Charlie said very definitely.

"I'm hungry," Robin said. "I wish we had something."

With a little squeal of delight, she looked down at her feet. Two platters of fried chicken, with all the trimmings. Her favorite. They ate ravenously, not hearing the Indians any more. They watched the longboat return to the pirate ship. All this way, they could see little Crimson's dress as Blackbeard took her aboard. Robin finished her fried chicken and started to cry.

"Girls," said Charlie in disgust.

"I can't help it. Poor Crimson."

"Is she dead?"

"Blackbeard the pirate took her."

"Charles was my grandfather's name. My grandfather died and they named me Charles."

"I want Crimson!"

"Get down! The Indians will see you."

"The Indians went away. I want Crimson!"

"We could name this beach after Crimson."

"Aw, what do you know? It's only a beach."

"We could name the whole wide world." Charlie gestured expansively.

The green sand of the beach became crimson. The sky had a crimson glow.

"It sure is a funny world," Charlie said. Laughter loud as thunder echoed in the sky. "A world called Crimson," he added.

The tide came in. Spray and surf bounded off the rocks, wetting them. "We better go up the hill," Robin said. By hill she meant the perpendicular cliffs behind them.

The tide thundered in. They were sodden. They clung to the rocks.

"We need an elevator or something," Charlie said.

Golden cables flashed in the sunlight. The gilt elevator cage came down. They climbed in as a big wave came and battered the rocks. The elevator went up, up to the top of the cliff. They could see a long way across the water. They could watch the pirate ship sailing away, the skull black as night on its sail.

They got out of the elevator at the top of the cliff. They didn't see any Indians, but they saw the ashes of a campfire.

"Are there lions and tigers and everything?" Robin asked in wonder, gazing out over the beach and the sea and then turning around to see the green forest which began fifty yards beyond the edge of the cliff.

"Sure there are lions and tigers," Charlie said matter-of-factly.

Off somewhere in the woods, 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