The story focuses on how he and his lover confront the problem that his 40 years in suspended animation will cause a wide age disparity between them by the time he returns.
Serling's narration begins with the opening scene of Stansfield in suspended animation: It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears.
It is also the story of the things that might happen to human beings who take a step beyond, unable to anticipate everything that might await them out there.The narration continues after Stansfield is informed that his journey into space will take forty years: Commander Douglas Stansfield, astronaut, a man about to embark on one of history's longest journeys: forty years out into endless space and hopefully back again.
Science has solved the mechanical details and now it's up to one human being to breathe life into blueprints and computers, to prove once and for all that man can live half a lifetime in the total void of outer space, forty years alone in the unknown.
The vast region in between is the Twilight Zone.Commander Douglas Stansfield, age 31, an astronaut in the year 1987, is scheduled in six months to be sent on an exploratory mission to a planetary system roughly 141 light-years from Earth.
They meet that night, after only three and half hours, they declare their love for each other, and lament the fact that when Stansfield returns, Sandra will be an old woman.
After Sandra leaves, General Walters offers some small consolation to the aged astronaut: "Stansfield, you're really quite an incredible man.