‘You are driven by something greater than yourself,’ Wang-Pu told him. ‘You also have sensitivities inside of yourself that are deep, although they are unresolved, and it is to those deep sensitivities that I have been addressing myself. You are a man who can understand the fears of others, as well as your own fears, and that is what will make you great.’

‘What are you — some kind of a clairvoyant?’ asked Collis.

Wang-Pu raised his hand in a quiet gesture of acknowledgment. ‘Everybody in California is a clairvoyant. This is the territory from which there is no going back. Only forward. We have learned, over the years, to look only in that direction.’

‘I still don’t understand why you’re talking to me this way. You don’t talk to Andy Hunt this way, do you?’

‘I tried. But he is not a responsive man, in that respect. In the end, I had to make a joke of what I had told him, and pretend that I had been quoting Confucius. What I have to tell you, though, is something different.’

Collis said nothing, but leaned back in his chair, waiting for Wang-Pu to speak. Wang-Pu poured the remaining four or five fingers of whisky into the glasses in front of them. ‘If you really want to build a railroad, Mr Edmonds, then consider the Chinese for your labourers.’

Collis rubbed his chin with his hand. There was an odd pause, then he sat up a little, lacing his fingers together. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you don’t mind my saying so, and this is speaking theoretically, it seems to me that the Chinese aren’t exactly heavyweights, as a race. I always thought the best railroad labourers were Irish, or Polish. Big muscular fellows.’

‘Maybe it seems that way.’ Wang-Pu smiled. ‘But you must think of the numerous advantages of the Chinese character. The Chinese are industrious in a way which makes the hardest-working Occidental appear positively sluggardly. Their attitude to work is historical. They have a thousand-year heritage of cultivating rice fields of untold acreage, and of coping almost yearly with tragic and disastrous floods, on the Yangtze and the Hwang Ho. We may not be physical giants. But we have a persistence against which not even the Sierra Nevada can stand.’

‘You seem pretty sure that I’m going to build this railroad,’ said Collis. ‘In fact, you seem a damned sight surer than I am.’

‘You forget that I’ve already met Theodore Jones. I think I know what effect his technical expertise and your aura of destiny will have upon each other. Theodore Jones has the mechanical vision. You, from what I have observed, have the historical vision. Together, you will have both the competence and the inspiration to plan this railroad, and it is my humble suggestion that when that time comes, the Chinese people might be the ideal instrument for constructing it.’