Kaiju Preservation Society(37)

“Oh, boy,” I said.

“When I was thinking about you for this gig I checked your LinkedIn. Your official title at füdmüd was something like ‘director of marketing,’ was it not?”

“Assistant director of marketing and customer retention,” I said. “It mostly meant I went into meetings and listened to other people talk. When I finally presented my own ideas, I got axed.”

“It’s not your fault,” Tom said. “I checked out füdmüd’s CEO after we talked. Turns out I know him.”

“You know Rob Sanders?”

“I mostly knew of him, to be fair. He was a couple of years ahead of me at Dartmouth as an undergrad. Even then, he had a reputation for smarmy backstabbing. He was a legacy kid. Fourth generation or something. Family mostly makes money in defense contracts. I believe most of the füdmüd angel investing came out of the family venture capital fund.”

“Must be nice.”

Tom nodded. “There’s something to be said for being a Large Adult Son. So I believe you didn’t get fired for lack of competence. Which is good, because marketing and customer retention is just about perfect—”

“Don’t you say it,” I warned.

“—for babysitting our tourists while they’re here.”

“I lift things,” I protested.

Tom raised his hands placatingly. “I know. And you’re very good at that, from what I’ve been hearing. Even Val likes you, and she’s number one on the base betting pool for Most Likely to Throw Someone Out of the Trees.”

“Come on, she’s great.”

“She is great. She will also throw you out of the trees if you cross her.”

“Is there something about this place that everyone is great, except that they will murder you if you cross them?”

“There is a certain personality type that thrives here, yes,” Tom said.

“But if Val likes me, then I should just keep lifting things,” I said. “Don’t you have someone else you can bother with this?”

“We did, but she’s Red Team, and she left KPS this year anyway.”

“Sylvia Braithwhite?” I asked.

Tom looked at me funny. “You know her?”

“She had my room before I did,” I said. “Left me a very nice welcome note. Asked me to watch after her potted plant.”

“We don’t usually get tourists at Tanaka Base,” Tom said. “Honda Base is larger and better suited for visitors anyway. Many fewer bloodsucking flies, for one. But every now and again, some would come here and she would chaperone them around. Keep them busy. Make sure they weren’t eaten. That sort of thing. We’d like you to take up the gig.”

“This strongly implies tourists are imminent.”

“We just had a kaiju go up. News got back to Earth. We were swamped by requests. And by ‘requests,’ I mean demands. The Pentagon. Department of Energy. NASA. Several senators. Pretty much all the billionaires. And that’s just the U.S. people.”

“How do you choose?”

“We don’t. The people back home do. They were clever about it, at least. They said they could accommodate three small groups here, once a week, starting two weeks from now. Then they have to shut down the Honda Base gate for maintenance for a couple of weeks.”

“Is that something they usually do? Shut down the gate, I mean.”

“Yeah. They usually do it a few weeks later into every team rotation than this, but this isn’t completely out of line. And it has the advantage that a couple of weeks down will give them an excuse for thinning out the requests. Three straight weeks of guests isn’t great for our work. Time and resources we spend on them are time and resources we can’t spend on our things. But this is what we get for being an NGO and being officially off the books.”

I sighed. “So you need me to be cruise director for three weeks.”

“Yes. More accurately, for two days each of those three weeks. A group of six tourists each time. They come in on the Shobijin, we plop three of them into Chopper Two to the site while the others settle in, rotate the groups, the next day we do lab presentations and you take them on a field trip. Then they go home. Which reminds me, you need ground training.” Tom pulled out his phone.

“Why? What’s ground training?”

“It just means you’re rated to work on the jungle floor. You and the rest of the new people were going to get the training anyway, but not for a few weeks. I’ll just get Riddu to give you an early tutorial.” Tom typed in something, paused, and then started typing again. “Probably weapons training, too.”

“Weapons training is not usually part of cruise directing,” I said.

“It’s fine,” Tom said. “So, you’ll do it?”

“I mean, do I have a choice?”

Tom put down his phone. “Actually, yes, you do have a choice, Jamie. I’m asking you to do something outside of the scope of your employment, mostly because I suspect you’ll be good at it. But also because, if you don’t mind me being blunt about it, everyone else who I’d pick for this is doing actual science at the moment. If I have them do it, we potentially lose knowledge. If I have you do it, then Val lifts a few more things for a couple of days each of the next three weeks.”