What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
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New Stories From the Twilight Zone
SOLVED: Adult Fiction
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SOLVED. Sci Fi: Short Stories, West, Gold, Four Men [s]
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I'm not sure about the original story, but I know I've seen this on television. It was an episode of Twilight Zone or Outer Limits. I'll do some thinking and see what I can come up with.
My best suggestion would be to look for a novelization of Twilight Zone Episodes. "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" originally aired on April 21, 1961 and was written by Rod Serling. The wikipedia entry on the the episode is here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rip_...
Me again! By cruising through the Twilight Zone Cafe, I found the following information. In the late sixties, early seventies 3 paperbacks were published: Stories from the Twilight Zone, More Stories from the the Twilight Zone and New Stories from the Twilight Zone. One of the six stories in New Stories from the Twilight Zone is "The Rip Van Winkle Caper"
It’s about four men from the past, I think it was the wild west kind of thing. They’re 4 thieves and they’ve stolen a whole bunch of gold. So, it starts off with them in their hideout, somewhere in a cave in the desert, I think.
They believe that gold will be more valuable in the future because there will be less of it, so they create stasis chambers and prepare a vehicle that will be able to last a long time. They go into the stasis chambers and when they wake up, thousands of years later, there are only three of them alive (a rock fell from the ceiling and broke open the chamber of one of the men, so when they wake up, he’s a skeleton). Somehow they get to arguing and one of the men ends up falling to his death by accidentally driving the vehicle off a cliff.
The remaining 2 men take some water and the gold and start trekking across the desert. Eventually the man holding the gold becomes thirsty and begs the other man to have some of the water. He will only allow him to have a sip if he gives him some of the bars of gold, and so they carry on that way by making deals. The next part I don’t remember well...either they got angry at each other and so one man killed the other, or the man carrying the gold died of exhaustion and dehydration.
The man carrying the water is the last survivor and he takes the gold and the water and carries on. He is slowly losing strength and by the time he comes to a road, he is very close to death. A couple is driving down the road and they stop when they see him. He begs them to give him water and to help him, and that he’ll give them lots of gold if they help him. He then dies right before them. Then the woman turns to her companion and says something to the effect of “That poor man. The heat must have made him delusional. Doesn’t he know that gold is worthless now that it’s manufactured?”
The gist of the story is that all the men die for nothing because the gold ended up being worthless in the future. I know that this story is part of a book of short stories, and I can’t really remember anything else besides that. I would really appreciate it if any of you recognize this story. Thanks!