Planet of the Angry Giants

Planet of the Angry Giants by Robert Silverberg - The inhabitants of Dunhill V were gigantic. They were peaceful and good natured until something happened to upset them—and then their wrath was truly terrific!

Commander Laurence Burke, who headed the Terran Colony on the planet of Dunhill V, was a small small as Earthmen went: he was a wiry figure no more than five feet six inches tall, with hardly an ounce of superfluous fat on his body. Despite the handicap of his size, Burke had been sufficiently adept at catching the attention of his superiors to reach his present fairly important post, as head of the tiny settlement on Dunhill V. There was one aspect of the Dunhill V assignment that Commander Burke particularly relished: although he was by six inches the shortest Earthman in the settlement, that fact tended to be overlooked in the general scheme of things—for the simple reason that the natives of Dunhill V averaged around eleven feet in height, thus making all Earthmen look like Dwarfs and making any individual difference in height seem insignificant.

Life was fairly quiet for the small band of Earthmen on Dunhill V. There were only some hundred and fifty of them, living in temporary plastic domes. All the colonists were scientific observers, studying the planet's ecology and trying to determine whether it would be possible and desirable for Earth to send out a full-scale colonizing mission.

There were many factors to be considered: the climate, the edibility of the native foods, the problem of indigenous diseases, and–by far the most important—the attitude of the natives toward having another civilization settle practically in its midst.