UNKNOWN

Julia Porteous leads a team of young Australian scientists taking samples from Antarctic ice, investigating ancient climate change.

In an ice core taken from the five-million-year level, they find modern human remains under a polycarbonate dome.

Her boss, Stan Nightingale, is reluctant to give the findings credibility, but nevertheless, funds the building of a lift to access the dome and the human remains.

Inside he dome, Julia becomes infected by a bacteria that appears to share DNA with one brought back by a NASA Mars probe.

Jim Somerville, Stan's American colleague's attempt to compare the bacteria samples draws the attention of Hiram Caxton, rogue CIA Director, who has Sommerville arrested and tortured.

Caxton learns enough to have the dig sabotaged to protect the re-election prospects of his fundamental Christian president, who needs the votes of those who believe in Adam and Eve and a ten-thousand-year-old universe.

Agents sent by Caxton disable the lift, trapping the Australian team under the ice, where they will die unless rescued quickly. But it is winter in Antarctica where nothing moves except the wind.

Stafford Ray was born into a deeply religious, fundamental Exclusive Brethren family, where access to music and reading should have been limited to classics, hymns, the Bible and other religious texts, but his maternal grandmother, Eusebia, an Internationalist, thought otherwise. His father encouraged his interest in music. By fourteen, he was reading the Complete Works of Shakespeare and at sixteen was introduced to Charles Darwin at Parramatta High School. Darwin was smuggled in and read in secret, but so began an intense interest in science and how things really worked, along with the drive to write. Trained as a teacher, but already recognised as a musician, composer and arranger, he was in heavy demand in Sydney recording studios and on television, back when TV stations had their own orchestras. When there was time, he began writing musical plays for classroom use and is currently developing a drama-based literacy program that could revolutionise how reading is taught.His first novel Cull was conceived as a play, set in the White House, in which much the same scenario was to be planned, but his daughter, Julia, a gifted teacher, advised him to use the novel form to tell the story because, as she said: "Dad! Nobody reads plays and this story needs to be told!"