[1] Pelham[a] invents Eternity, a drug that puts the body into a hibernation-like state that can last decades.

Realizing that this makes interstellar space travel possible, his rich college friend Jim Renfrew builds an atomically powered spacecraft capable of missions lasting hundreds of years.

He learns that Pelham did not survive the initial dose of the drug, and is forced to dispose of the decayed body.

He files a log report and sends a radio message back to Earth before taking another dose of the drug, enough to last 150 years.

Forced to listen to them while he slowly awakes from the effects of the drug, he finally looks in various viewers and finds a spaceship on fire.

After searching for lifeboats with no result, he notices the hulk is slowing, and watches it as the fire fades away and the ship disappears into space.

On a lark, Blake had turned on the radio receiver and found the space around Alpha Centauri filled with human voices.

In the time it took for their ship to reach Alpha Centauri, human science had progressed to the point where the flight from Earth now takes only three hours.

As he moves to shake their hands, Bill notices him wrinkle his nose in apparent disgust, and Cassellahat explains that they have an extremely offensive odour.

In a letter to van Vogt, Campbell lays out the entire concept, in which a sleeper ship arrives at its destination to find its target planet already colonized.

[5] Although showing similar themes and components, the story is not a considered a sequel, as it involves an entirely unrelated plot.

Gregory Matloff recalls Robert Forward invoking it: He had a famous plot of the velocity of human beings versus time.

Among later stories, one of the most direct was by Clifford D. Simak, who used it as the basis for his 1976 book Shakespeare's Planet,[6] which uses not only the overall plot of arriving to find the planet settled, but also the minor plot points of one of the crew dying en route, and oversleeping due to the unexplored nature of the drug.

[8] Colin Wilson considered that the opening impressed by showing the enormous distance to be covered in travelling to another star.