Steve stopped short and looked at her. Lois stopped too, to face him seriously. "Bribery?" she asked.
Steve said nothing.
Lois stamped her foot. "What kind of man is Wrightwood?" she stormed. "You'd think we were doing this for spite instead of for his own protection."
Steve nodded. "William Wrightwood is a power-hungry man," he said. "Nothing but being an absolute dictator of the universe would satisfy him, and that would only partially sate him because it is not so much the wielding of power that pleases Wrightwood. It is the gaining of more and more power."
"I hadn't considered that."
Steve nodded and turned; they started towards the mess again. "What makes a man that way?" she asked idly.
"Frustration of one sort or another," he said.
"And what is Wrightwood's particular frustration?"
Steve snorted angrily. "Something in his psyche insists that the inability to father a son means that the man is less than a man."