With their shoulder-mounted lights off and the sonar deactivated, the black suits were silent invaders into the briny depths. Thermographs, struggling against the polar currents, only offered them vector graphics of the world around them, sketchy green outlines devoid of color or details. It made the whole scene seem unreal. Schools of cartoon fish swam by like the radioactive ghosts of trout long past. Unbelievably, plant life was abundant in the crevices of the flat plain, waving fronds, bushy clumps that shrank inside themselves at their approach, and weird things resembling upsidedown octopi. And crabs, of course.