"What is it you want to tell me?"
Before Glaudot could answer, they heard a crashing, rending sound not too far off in the woods. It sounded to Glaudot exactly as if trees were being uprooted, boulders strewn carelessly.
"Cyclopes!" Robin screamed in terror, and began to run.
Glaudot ran after her, stumbling, picking himself up, hurtling in pursuit. He couldn't let her get away. He had to follow her ...
Nothing living, he told himself as he ran, could uproot those huge trees. Of course, there were the saplings, but even the saplings were the size of full-grown oaks and maples on far Earth.
Something roared behind him. The sound was pitched almost too low for human ears. He whirled. The earth shook, great clods of it flying. Bare tree roots suddenly appeared, and a young tree the size of a towering oak was lifted skyward.
Behind it, brandishing it and then hurling it away, was a naked man whose head towered impossibly a hundred and fifty feet into the air. Trembling, awestruck, Glaudot looked up at the great savage face. Wild hair streaming, filthy beard matted with dirt and tree-branches, it was the most ferocious face Glaudot had ever seen.
And it had only one eye, one enormous eye in the middle of its head. But an eye three feet across!
"A Cyclops!" Robin screamed again.
A moment later the creature stooped and with a scooping motion of its great right hand picked up the two tiny creatures on the forest floor beneath it. Then it ran, uprooting oak-sized saplings, back toward the rocky hillside where it dwelled, after the Cyclopes of old on which Robin and Charlie had naively patterned it, in a cave overlooking the sea.