"Noonian!"
"Oh for the love of..." Soong threw down the sonic driver. "Yes?"
"Tom's here! He wants to meet the new android!"
"Of course he does." Soong grumbled, scowling. "Can't keep his nose out..."
Muttering to himself, he closed the access port on the android's skull and stalked round the chair to the stairs leading from the lab up to the main living area of the small house.
"You tell Tom I'll be five minutes!" he shouted up.
"All right! I'll let him know!" his wife replied. Still muttering under his breath, Soong turned back to the android looking up at him from the chair. It cocked its head at him quizzically.
"Right!" Soong clapped his hands. "Up! Up! Get up, let's see if we've ironed out those creases!"
"I was not creased..." The android's brows came together in confusion as it rose out of the chair with fluid grace.
"It's an expression, an idiom. It just means..." Soong waved his hands, searching for the right words. "It means, let's see if we've fixed the problem. Come on over here, come on!" Soong turned to his work bench and waved the android over. It cocked its head as its eyes flicked from left to right and back again.
"Idiom;" it murmured. "A group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words."
"Yes, yes, come on, I want to show that damned man what a real scientist can do! Here!" Soong held out a glass. "Take it, then pass it from hand to hand."
Stepping forward, the android reached out and gently took the glass from the scientist's hand. It rolled it between its fingers, delicate sensors under the bioplast that served as skin logging reams of information about weight, texture and tensile strength, while the optical sensors that served for its eyes fed visual details to its neural net to be translated into dimensions and aesthetic details. It passed the glass from its left hand to its right and back again. Soong clapped his hands with delight.
"Wonderful! Here!" He took the glass, and handed the android an old fashioned steel wrench. It studied it, memorising every detail in a fraction of a second.
"Bend it in half, one hand only." Soong ordered. The android put its thumb in the middle of the tool and wrapped its ring and little finders round the lower half, before neatly creasing the wrench down the middle, folding the metal with its index and middle finger.
"Ha! Perfect!" Soong crowed. "One more..." He held out his hand for the ruined spanner, and replaced it with an egg. He flinched slightly as he was showered with shell and yolk, then sighed resignedly.
"I appear to have miscalculated." The android turned its hand to watch the albumen drip through its fingers. Viscosity. Refraction. Moisture content. Flow velocity.
"No kidding." Soong shook his head and looked down at his shirt. "Come on, let's go upstairs and get cleaned up. Like hell am I letting Tom Handy see me with egg on my face, he'll never let me live it down."