"What the hell," says Pat, "it's better than starving."

It is not.

* * * * *

_June 24, 1961, probably_

I'm hungry. So is everybody else. Right now I could eat a dinner raw, in
a centrifuge, and keep it down. A Martian threw a stone at Jones today,
and Jones threw one back at him and broke off a couple of scales. The
Martian whistled furiously and went away. When the crowd thinned out,
same as it did yesterday (must be some sort of sleeping cycle here),
Kroger talked Lloyd into swimming across the river and getting the red
scales. Lloyd started at the upstream part of the current, and was about
a hundred yards below this underground island before he made the far
side. Sure is a swift current.

But he got the scales, walked very far upstream of us, and swam back
with them. The stream sides are steep, like in a fjord, and we had to
lift him out of the swirling cold water, with the scales gripped in his
fist. Or what was left of the scales. They had melted down in the water
and left his hand all sticky.

Kroger took the gummy things, studied them in the uncertain light, then
tasted them and grinned.

The Martians are made of sugar.

* * * * *

Later, same day. Kroger said that the Martian metabolism must be like
Terran (Earth-type) metabolism, only with no pancreas to make insulin.
They store their energy on the _outside_ of their bodies, in the form of
scales. He's watched them more closely and seen that they have long
rubbery tubes for tongues, and that they now and then suck up water from
the stream while they're watching us, being careful not to get their
lips (all sugar, of course) wet. He guesses that their "blood" must be
almost pure water, and that it washes away (from the inside, of course)
the sugar they need for energy.

I asked him where the sugar came from, and he said probably their bodies
isolated carbon from something (he thought it might be the moss) and
combined it with the hydrogen and oxygen in the water (even _I_ knew the
formula for water) to make sugar, a common carbohydrate.

Like plants, on Earth, he said. Except, instead of using special cells
on leaves to form carbohydrates with the help of sunpower, as Earth
plants do in photosynthesis (Kroger spelled that word for me), they used
the _shape_ of the scales like prisms, to isolate the spectra (another
Kroger word) necessary t