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"Rescue Party" is a 10,000-word story by Arthur C. Clarke, about an intergalactic spaceship that comes to Earth to rescue the human race from a nova. The story was first published in the May, 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

The S9000 is a giant exploration spaceship, manned by several different sentient species that make up an intergalactic federation. Their federation is eons old, and they last visited Earth 400,000 years ago, discovering scattered animal and plant life, but no intelligence. Now they receive word to divert from their main route and head to our solar system, because an outpost 200 light years away is picking up radio transmissions from Earth. But what makes the matter urgent is that the sun is about to go nova, so the S9000 must rescue whatever inhabitants they can.

They arrive and begin searching, with only hours before the sun blows up, but all they find is an abandoned world, with empty cities, and a giant parabolic transmitter, giving out television and telemetry data. On the night side of the Earth they detect an underground room with machines. But when several crewmen enter, the automatic door closes, and they are whisked away to an unknown, underground tunnel. They assume that’s where the planet’s inhabitants have all gone—underground, to delay their inevitable destruction as much as possible. But for the alien rescue party, they have only a few minutes left before the sun explodes. Their mother ship blasts a hole in the earth, down to the tunnel, and rescues them just in time. They see the moon burn and then blow up; but they are shielded by the Earth, and are able to get away in the Earth’s corona and jump to light speed.

Examining their data, they now realize that the transmitter they found must be sending signals to some place outside the solar system, though it seems incredible to them that a civilization so young could have interplanetary travel. They follow the signal, and eventually come upon a fleet of ships, which to their astonishment is powered by rockets. They are generation ships, built to save the human race from the catastrophe. The Captain of the S9000 prepares to make first contact with the ships from Earth:

“You know,” he said to Rugon, “I feel rather afraid of these people. Suppose they don’t like our little Federation?” He waved once more toward the star-clouds (rocket engines) that lay massed across the screen, glowing with the light of their countless suns.

“Something tells me they’ll be very determined people,” he added. “We had better be polite to them. After all, we only outnumber them about a thousand million to one.”

Rugon laughed at his captain’s little joke.

Twenty years afterward, the remark didn’t seem funny.

Additional Notes

This story has been reprinted in, among other places, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 8 (1946).