Thomas Jefferson Survives

By C. J. Hayek

When Thomas Jefferson went into his self-induced hibernation on July 4, 1826, he hoped to see the far-future result of the American Experiment he had helped to start.

After he awakens in our time, he is horrified to discover that an ancient cult of criminals, having schemed for centuries behind the scenes, is now poised to enslave America and the world.

But before Jefferson and the patriots who rally to him can cast down the enemies of humanity a second and final time, he is forced to use deep trickery to secure his own, quite personal, survival!

 

From THOMAS JEFFERSON SURVIVES:

 

Tom had been in the JAG's office a few minutes before the Admiral got to his real purpose in calling him in.

"The government has reason to believe that your esteemed ancestor, Thomas Jefferson, never really died—and that he has recently returned to life in the flesh, to dwell among us."

"That sounds… totally preposterous, sir."

"Yeah. It sure does. It surely does." The JAG took a folder from a credenza beside him and dropped it down on the desk before Tom.

"This is the FBI report."

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: IMT Publishers
• Release date: Mar 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393449959

C. J. Hayek

C. J. Hayek is an American author and a former editor of a nationally distributed magazine. He lives with his wife and family in rural Virginia.

Book preview

She held the gun with lethal competence. (Her training had taught her everything.) She pointed it at the chest of one of the targets—the main one—with the other two (and then one more) to follow swiftly. Look at them stare! They were so astonished; they couldn’t believe her steely look, her cold composure, her complete determination.

The command still echoed irresistibly in her mind. Shoot to kill! Her finger tightened on the trigger. But suddenly, that other part of her, the part that still thought of itself as truly she, truly herself, after all these years, appeared out of nowhere. That part was desperate to stop her.

But she was stronger! The commands overrode everything. Yes, yes, said the other part, but I can change the sequence; you still will be obedient... With this she was just able to agree.

Slowly, her hand moved, and the gun swung around until the barrel’s cold tip pressed against the soft skin of her temple. Her hand was trembling slightly now, even as her finger tightened again on the trigger...

1.  A Glorious Fourth

It was the Fourth of July, and John Adams was dying. He knew he was dying today. He was ninety years old, after all, and his wife (his dearest Friend) had long since passed. It was time. The farmhouse near Quincy, Massachusetts, was full of subdued visitors, some of whom, with his granddaughter Susanna, watched at his bedside.

As the soft, rain-cooled air drifted in, and the town’s cannons roared, he reflected that it was a good day to die, at least for him. For this was not just the Fourth; it was the Fourth exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence had been signed.

All America was celebrating.

Of course, his lanky, free-thinking, polymath friend Thomas Jefferson had written that Declaration—but it had been John Adams who had used all his personal force and desperate skill to get the vote making what that document declared a blessed fact.

A few days ago, Adams, upon being asked, had given a toast to be repeated at the celebrations today. It had consisted only of two words—for him, they expressed all: Independence forever!

As for Jefferson, he was close to death now himself, according to Adams’s information. As they had joked in their letters, it was almost as though they were racing each other to the grave.

It was a race Adams knew he would win.

With the breath fast leaving his body—a few hours ago he had started to find it very difficult, indeed, to breathe—he thought furiously about a particular, downright bizarre letter Jefferson recently had sent him.

The Hanook tribe in the far west... the mushroom brought back by Lewis and Clark, which as used by the Indians slowed the pulse of life to a crawl for hours at a time... Jefferson’s derivation of a serum of this mushroom’s essential properties... his experimental injection of it into himself... his week-long spell of hibernation at his summer retreat, Poplar Forest... his subsequent, careful, insane-seeming plan... it all tumbled through Adams’s mind at breakneck speed, but with an eerie clarity.

Adams had been sworn to secrecy, of course, and as instructed he had burned the letter after reading it; for what it told him was not only almost incredible, but extraordinarily sensitive. With his serum as the instrument, Thomas Jefferson hoped to lie dormant, but not dead, into the far future—then to awaken and see for himself the remote result of the American Experiment that together they had launched.

Could it be true? Had he, Adams, just dreamt that letter? But he knew he had not. And as his last stores of breath were giving out, delight and wonder at his friend’s fantastic plan suddenly coursed through him. He stirred—a scarcely noticeable action, to outward sight—and with acute astonishment exclaimed, though his words rasped out in so faint a whisper that Susanna, bending low over him, scarcely could make them out: Thomas Jefferson survives!

History would record that these words were his last; his heart was stilled a few minutes later.

History would also say that these last words were not accurate—for Jefferson, too, had died on that same Fourth of July, several hours before Adams.

But in this, as sometimes happens, History would prove to be quite mistaken.

AS IT WAS, HISTORY gave far fewer details about Jefferson’s death than about his friend’s. It did not say who was with him when he died, or what he died of, or what his last words were—though it did report that he asked, very early in the morning, Is it the Fourth? Nevertheless, History asserted confidently that Thomas Jefferson died a little before l:00 p.m. on July 4, 1826, and was buried in the family plot at Monticello.

True, he felt near enough to death on that day, and when he heard the answer to his question, he knew he must begin his experiment on it, or perhaps not at all.

All was ready. He had updated his will; he had even drafted his epitaph, in which he listed many of his accomplishments but left out having been President of the United States, for his tombstone. He had instructed his grandson Jeff, who reluctantly had agreed to ask no questions of him, about what to say and do. And the contents of the chamber deep within the rock of the mountain Monticello stood on had been in their final state of preparation for a week. That was cutting it close—much too close—he thought, but naturally there had been all manner of unexpected delays...

The day was bright, hot, and blue outside the high windows of his ground-floor study-cum-bedchamber. Finally, the house he had torn down and rebuilt so many times was in a state that satisfied him. As far as he was concerned, he could live in this eccentric mansion—with its octagonal rooms, its dumbwaiters, automatic doors, busts, beloved books, paintings from Europe, and various scientific curiosities—forever, as the seasons slowly changed around him.

Nevertheless, though so weak he could hardly move his arm, now he reached up and pulled the cord next to his bed. Soon enough, in response to this signal, three servants—John Hemings, Joe Fossett, and old Burwell, who were among the most trusted on the estate—came in through the french doors of his bedchamber.

Jefferson looked up. Holding Burwell’s eye tiredly but steadily, he said, his voice scarcely above a whisper, It is time.

At this, John and Burwell lifted him from his bed and helped him stand upright. As Burwell continued to prop Jefferson up, John, aided by Fossett, took the life-sized waxworks figure (made by an artificer in Philadelphia who used to supply Madame Tussaud’s) from under the tarp on the handcart outside the doors. They laid this object carefully on the bed, adjusting its position a few times. Then John drew the sheet up over the figure’s face, which had been exquisitely fashioned to pass at least brief inspection as that of Jefferson’s eighty-three-year-old corpse. (And if his emphatic instructions were followed, there would be no inspection at all before the figure was solemnly buried.)

The three servants now carefully, even tenderly, helped Jefferson himself through the doors and laid him on the handcart. Despite their care, this procedure was jarringly painful to him. After covering him with the tarp, Burwell and Fossett began to push the small conveyance along the gravel path by the house.

At a signal from the departing John, Jeff, who had been sitting outside of his study, shortly would enter it. After about a half-hour, during which he would not lift the sheet over the supposed corpse of his grandfather, he would tearfully announce his death.

For the next five minutes or so Jefferson felt dead already, with the coarse tarp scratching his face, his frail body barely taking the bumps and jolts that came when the cart left the path and was pushed over open ground. But finally this punishment ceased with the cart’s motion.

There was a short pause before the three servants lifted the tarp and helped him to his feet. He stood now, with their continued assistance, in a small hollow that also was a wooded copse, well out of view of the house. So far, all had gone according to plan.

All three servants knew he had freed them in his will. He had done so partly because, as with all slaves he had given freedom, he had seen to it that they were trained as skilled craftsmen and so would be able to earn a living in that condition. But instead of the mingled excitement and apprehension he expected in their faces as they contemplated this future, he saw their sympathetic, wonderstruck absorption in the present business—though also, to a man, their eyes glittered with tears. He moved his hand on Fosset’s shoulder slightly, and the blacksmith said emotionally, Mr. Jefferson, you will live forever, surely you will.

In his great bodily weakness, he gave merely the most faint and wintry of smiles in reply. But it wasn’t just weakness; any displays of their undoubted devotion embarrassed him, due to his clear knowledge that in holding them in bondage, he was in the wrong. With no further words, they half-carried him down a flight of steps, all cut into the same slab of rock, into a tunneled passage.

There, just past the bright pillar of sunlight from above, a litter was waiting. On it his slaves bore him a hundred or so feet through the darkening tunnel to the big dumbwaiter in its deep, natural shaft. The crackling torches they carried and then placed in wall-holders now lit the subterranean surroundings dimly. They set him down in a seated position on the large platform of treated wood, and in his hand put a lit candle in a brass chamberstick. Jefferson said very faintly, I must go now...

Whether they heard him or not, they soon began turning the top handle. As they lowered him further into the coolness under the earth he heard their occasional, muttering voices more and more faintly, and then not at all.

HE MUST HAVE FALLEN asleep before the end of the platform’s descent; he suddenly realized it had stopped and that his candle had burned down halfway. All was silent and cool around him; he again was in that other world, familiar to him from many earlier trips over the years, a dark world of eternally moderate temperatures, so close to and yet so apart from the bright heat and innumerable sounds of life above.

Not far to go now!—and that on his two feet.

But suddenly it seemed he had left it too long. His remaining drabs of strength were dwindling fast. How easy it would be just to go to sleep again where he sat, and let his life sputter out with the candle’s! The fifty feet or so to the slab where the syringe waited surely were too far for him to walk without help. His plan was preposterous, anyway. It would make no difference if he died here or on the slab, his blood invaded by what undoubtedly was a lethal dose of the extract.

But something about the unfitness of the former position, as one for his corpse to be in, at length struck him, and several minutes later, after a light doze, he had risen to his feet. After he did that nearly impossible thing, some shadow of his usual confidence returned to him. With unutterable effort he clamped the platform to the side of the shaft. He straightened himself and started to shuffle forward into the cavern, as the familiar, terrible pain seized his legs.

Some minutes later, he only realized he had reached the slab when he bumped into it. He lay down gratefully, on stone that felt as soft as pillows.

He woke up sometime later. The candle, which he had put on the floor, now had only a fraction of an inch left. After what seemed like two hours, he reached down painfully, took the prepared syringe from its wooden box, and pushed up his sleeve. Hesitating no more, he put the device on his skin and pressed it to. If all was as it should be, the serum now was tumbling into his bloodstream in massive, unprecedented amounts.

It was done—for what it was worth. And his earthly life, in all likelihood, was done, too.

He scarcely had time to ask the pardon of God for his sins before total darkness came down on him.

2.  An Experiment in Madness

I never get drunk, I just drink a lot, said Tom Jones to Baron Alfredo von List, about two hundred years later. On a visit to DC, Alfredo had called him a few hours ago with the most welcome suggestion of a night on the town.

The bar they had been in before this one had been dank, dark, and crowded, with a raucous, fun-loving chanting-along with what seemed to have been a cult movie called Monkey versus Robot, in which a guy in a robot suit fought epic battles with a guy in a monkey suit. By contrast, their present location was sleekly modern and well-lit, with all of its surfaces, including those of the couches and other furniture, a blinding white. Tom found the effect oddly soothing. That’s lucky, he added, picking up his painfully-priced but ideally-balanced sidecar from the white table near his knee. I just read getting drunk is what they call a ‘mortal’ sin. I never knew that.

He felt oddly comfortable making such a comment to von List, of all people. Not that Alfredo would be likely to agree with his present trend of thought; far from it. But in some way he would get where Tom was coming from where others would not. He was... European, cultured enough for that.

And where was Tom coming from? These days, Tom was coming from a place few his age would recognize, a place dim and far back in the cultural memory of his generation—the Land of Old-Time Morality. Specifically, he had become (weirdly enough) an enthusiast for old-fashioned moral rules—however much he had violated them in the past. Such violations were all over now, he told himself. In fact, recently he had decided to make an experiment out of his life: he would do research, nail down what those old-fashioned moral rules were, exactly, and simply live by them. He was from Richmond, Virginia, after all, and he had finally gotten sick of his own modernismic ways. All that sex; after a while, it just got depressing. And why depressing, unless it was wrong? No; he would go back in time and adhere, strictly, to a properly old-fashioned and detailed rule-book on how to live... It was sort of like that movie, he supposed, the one with the guy who decided to eat all his meals at McDonald’s for thirty days or whatever. What would be the effects? It wasn’t that the modern way was making him so happy, anyway.

He had already explained something of this to Alfredo, who now replied: "Ah, is ziss part of zat disastrous morality research you are doing?" Tom always wondered how much of the German accent was put on; Alfredo had mostly grown up in the ritzy but still American confines of Westchester, New York.

Oh, yes—

"—To such a state has our society come, zat one must do research to—"

To find out what’s right or wrong?

I was going to say, even to ascertain zose customary old claims to trutse, even if trutse zey are not.

That was a classic von List formulation, Tom thought: snobbish and nihilistic at the same time. Envious fellow classmates back at UVA Law had called him E.T. (for Eurotrash) behind his back, but Tom had usually enjoyed his company. Of course, there had been that time when Tom had had to dissuade him from strangling a female hall-mate’s cat when said hall-mate was out. Wouldn’t it be amusing to see her reaction, Alfredo had pleaded, when she came back to find her precious kitty not just dead, but strangled to death? True, he had been on some esoteric drug at the time, and later apologized to Tom for his bad taste. No, Alfredo didn’t fit in very well in the Squaresville of law school, that was for sure, but in a bigger way, the way of the Great World, he was totally cool. Being a baron and incalculably rich (his mother was an heiress of a major American industrial fortune) was part of it, but he was also an intellectual, or at least had the affectation of intellectuality, of high cerebral culture, to go along with his consciously aristocratic, if also trashy, manners and deliberately elitist and old-fashioned attitudes.

Don’t get me wrong, Tom said, I’m still your basic, pretty nominal member of a mainline denomination—in my case Episcopalianism, the religion of my family. And I meet all the requirements of my religion: I attend divine services once or twice a year, I believe in the Spirit of Christmas, and all that sort of thing.

Zat is very commendable of you.

"But a religion should tell you how to live, Tom went on. It should give some guide to life, or what’s it for? I read that somewhere. So how are Episcopalians supposed to live? I asked around, and it seems these days (though maybe this is just my local church up here, I’m not sure) what it boils down to is that we’re supposed to recycle, and go in for other trendy causes."

Alfredo smiled. Fah! Ziss is propaganda. Ziss is what zeh masses are taught. To recycle! To save zeh Eartse. What nonsense, I can tell you, my friend!

"Yeah, and the other causes the Reverend Doctor Fanshawe talked about weren’t any more appealing, either. So, anyway, I’ve decided to live by the generally-accepted Episcopalian standards of some earlier time, and finally settled on the 1920s. The classic era of Episcopalianism."

"I know little of zeh tangle of sects zat grow like vines in zis country. Vas is das classic era of zeh Episcopal?"

The period just before the seventh Lambeth Conference, which allowed artificial methods of birth control, Tom said promptly.

Zat was very naughty of zem, I’m sure. Where I am from, zeh Church says no artificial means of birth control may be used, but everybody uses zem anyway.

Well, at least the true morality is still maintained by the authority, said Tom gloomily. It’s not just abandoned.

"Oh, but why is zis zeh true morality? Why is it not simply zeh very refinement of nonsense? I must agree, if it is nonsense you want, zeh Casolic Church still provides it in its purest form."

Tom sipped his sidecar in lieu of comment. Have you ever heard that little poem by Ogden Nash? I think it goes, ‘There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience, or none at all.’

Alfredo’s Italo-Germanic face crinkled in a laugh that reminded Tom vaguely of a certain mob movie actor, from an earlier time. "I know little of zis Ogden Nash. But let us analyze him sympatzetically, charitably. Seen zuss, I sink he is right. Let us say you meet every particular of zeh unnatural, life-denying standards of zeh spider morality, as Nietzsche called it; zat is zis morality people pull out of zemselves, like spiders. Let’s say, that is, you meet the morality of zeh Church, weseh classic Episcopal, or Casolic, or what—you are, let us say, a eunuch, yes?, zuss you can achieve zis—zen I grant you will be happy, after a fashion. But such happiness is very rare. But zen if you reject zat very notion of conscience, of morality, itself, zen you also will be happy, and more easily. Or razeh, you will rise above zeh idea of happiness and morality and every ozzer bourgeois confusion, and feel life in you."

"Hmm. Life? What do you mean by that? Tom’s voice became higher-pitched, sing-songy; he started in on his own version of the Dana Carvey routine they had used to watch on YouTube. A dark, driving, mysterious force. Hmmm... I wonder what that could be. Could it be—"

Oh, dear, now you are zeh Church Lady, said Alfredo, laughing.

"—SATAN?" He made his voice as deep, grating, and booming as he could. They both laughed, as people on nearby sofas turned to look at them.

"But ziss force—it need not be dark."

Tom considered for a moment. If you say so.

Dark, light! In zeh dark you cannot see—see all zeh pointlessness and ugliness of life.

Yes, but then if you go straight to Hell after you die...

"Ah, but zat is a myth! A fairytale to frighten children. We know ziss. We say to zeh children, zeh monster will get you! You will go to Hell! Who believes ziss?"

Actually, no one told me that when I was kid, as far as I remember, said Tom. I was just told about the Spirit of Christmas—that and the Easter Bunny. I came upon the holy doctrine of eternal punishment later, in my reading.

"Ah, zen you are a slave! Alfredo laughed again. A slave to ziss notion of conscience. Zen happiness will elude you! I predict. But you wish at least to be a slave to somezing consistent, somezing not self-evidently wrong on its face, yes? Zat I can understand. Zen you go back to a time before zeh contradiction arose."

Exactly! said Tom with renewed enthusiasm. "I’ve reconstituted the moral standards that in the classic era applied to people in my denomination, at least on paper, and I’m trying to live that way. To the letter. Sort of an experiment."

An experiment in madness—but all the nobler since zair is no God.

But what if there is? If there is, He would have endorsed a morality that produced happiness—wouldn’t He?—even if not the most animal pleasure.

Alfredo made no immediate reply. He seemed to have lost his train of thought; his eyes widened just noticeably, and he turned his head slightly.

Tom turned his head, too, if only to see what the baron was beholding. It was a girl, bending over the arm of the couch in the section next to theirs, asking something of a couple in the one further down. She was dressed rather incongruously in work-out gear: tight black spandex shorts and a matching top that bared the top of her back and her shoulders. Her firm, healthy-looking skin, where exposed, looked almost as white as a piece of paper, and her red hair was pulled into a short ponytail. Tom was looking at her as she turned around. With added incongruity, she had an unlit cigarette in her mouth. Apparently having failed with the couple on the other side of her, she scrunched on her knees across her sofa toward Tom.

He took in her face and everything else he could see of her all in a flash, far faster than he could have described it. A rather wide face, apple cheeks, a firm little chin, a small but somehow distinguished-looking nose, blue eyes that were very prettily made, a dusting of freckles on her face and under her high bangs on her forehead. A flame-like girl, he concluded wonderingly, straight from the Celtic fringe. And over all that delicacy, yet strength, that gentle, almost childlike perfection and symmetry of feature that bespeaks really solid beauty.

Excuse me, do you have a light? she asked. Her high voice had a scratchy, or even a crackling, sound that went with her pale eyes and her freckles. One of those voices, Tom thought, again in a flash and without putting words to his thoughts. Half-images flashed through his mind of morning, white rumpled sheets, sunlight in a bedroom...

Uh, yes! he said. He mostly had switched over to the putatively harmless nicotinized vapor of e-cigs, but he still carried with him a shiny chrome Zippo lighter, with the seal of the United States on it, that he’d bought at the Navy Exchange in Norfolk. He dug this out of his pocket, flipped the lid back, and after a few tries managed to start it with one hand.

She leaned over to reach the flame with her cigarette end and then stopped. She turned the cigarette downward and looked up. Oh, shit. The profanity was briefly jarring, but then he recognized it as only the convention of a somewhat tough, hip girl. She smirked ruefully. I guess I can’t smoke in here.

They take more of our freedoms daily.

She laughed, though slightly. It’s terrible! The only place I smoke is in bars, and they won’t let me do it there.

Do you go to bars a lot?

Oh, yeah, she said, with a distracted look.

Can I buy you a drink instead?

I’d better not. I was actually just leaving. I have a class.

Oh. Well, in that case, I might as well light your cigarette. They won’t mind if you smoke as you’re leaving. At least, they probably won’t be able to do anything about it.

Oh, OK! She put the cigarette back in her mouth and leaned over, and the cylinder puffed into life. She leaned back and blew a puff out into the air beside her. Thanks.

He supplied her with his name, rather desperately, before she could go anywhere.

‘Tom Jones,’ she repeated. That’s a great name. Sounds so—emblematic, I don’t know. She hesitated, then held out a smallish, perfectly-shaped hand. Anna. Anna Llewellyn.

He shook it, firmly, but careful not to try any funny business—no overly lingering, or in any way unusual, handshake—despite the remarkably smooth softness of her hand in his. That’s really emblematic, too, he said nonsensically. We’re two symbols. Oh— He suddenly remembered Alfredo’s existence. Allow me to introduce my friend, Baron von List.

Alfredo stood up gracefully, if stiffly. Alfredo, he said, bowing over her hand.