This was a desperate situation, indeed, until one of the boys from East St. Louis uttered the eternal truth: "There ain't no honest man who ain't a crook, and why should Mars be any different?" The difficulty was finding the means and method of corruption. All the cash in Jake Guzik's strong box meant nothing to a race of characters whose brats made mudpies of gold dust. The discovery came as an accident. The first Earthman to be eliminated on Mars was a two-bit hood from North Clark Street who sold a five-cent Hershey bar with almonds to a Martian for a gold piece worth 94 bucks. The man from Mars bit the candy bar. The hood bit the gold piece. Then the Martian picked up a rock and beaned the lad from the Windy City. After which the Martian's eyes dilated and he let out a scream. Then he attacked the first Martian female who passed by. Never before had such a thing happened on Mars, and to say she was surprised is putting it lightly. Thereupon, half the female population ran after the berserk Martian. When the organization heard about this, an investigation was ordered. That is how the crime trust found out that there is no sugar on Mars; that this was the first time it had ever been tasted by a Martian; that it acts on them like junk does on an Earthman. They further discovered that the chief source of Martian diet is--believe it or not--poppy seed, hemp and coca leaf, and that the alkaloids thereof: opium, hasheesh and cocaine have not the slightest visible effect on them. Poppies grow everywhere, huge russet poppies, ten times as large as those on Earth and 100 times as deadly. It is these poppies which have colored the planet red. Martians are strictly vegetarian: they bake, fry and stew these flowers and weeds and eat them raw with a goo made from fungus and called _szchmortz_ which passes for a salad dressing. Though the Martians were absolutely impervious to the narcotic qualities of the aforementioned flora, they got higher than Mars on small doses of sugar. So the Mafia was in business. The Martians sniffed granulated sugar, which they called snow. They ate cube sugar, which they called "hard stuff", and they injected molasses syrup into their veins with hypos and called this "mainliners." There was nothing they would not do for a pinch of sugar. Gold, platinum and diamonds, narcotics by the acre--these were to be had in generous exchange for sugar--which was selling on Earth at a nickel or so a pound wholesale. The space ship went into shuttle service. A load of diamonds and dope coming back, a load of sugar and blondes going up. Blondes made Martians higher even than sugar, and brought larger and quicker returns. This is a confidential tip to the South African diamond trust: ten space ship loads of precious stones are now being cut in a cellar on Bleecker Street in New York. The mob plans to retail them for $25 a carat!