As a building material, concrete has one major defect. It cannot creep under load, even slightly; it just cracks. A building cemented with concrete mortar will develop unsightly cracks as the ground slowly settles beneath it. The old lime mortar set much more slowly, and could creep with a building as it settled in. Daedalus is now inventing a more forgiving mortar, which never truly sets at all.

In fully set concrete the load is taken by the sand grains. They are held in position by the interlocking matrix of silicate crystals formed by the setting reaction between the cement and the water. Surplus water soon evaporates, leaving a porous but unyielding solid.

So Daedalus's new concrete is designed never to dry out. DREADCO's chemists are devising a calciferous mortar loaded with hygroscopic and deliquescent chemicals which take up water avidly from the air, and ‘super slurper’ polymers that can absorb hundreds of times their weight of water. This novel mixture sets, but stays wet. The crystals precipitated by the setting reaction are permanently immersed in their own saturated solution.

The resulting concrete is stress-sensitive. The sand grains of the mixture still carry the compressive load. But a shear load, which might cause cracking, stresses the crystals that hold the grains in place. And just as a stressed alloy is more vulnerable to corrosion, a stressed crystal is more soluble than an unstressed one. So the stressed crystals dissolve in the solution around them, allowing the sand grains nearby to creep and relax the stress. Meanwhile, the resulting supersaturated solution precipitates new unstressed crystals which hold the grains in their new positions. The mortar has yielded safely to the creep.

DREADCO's ‘Wet Cement’® will be welcomed by architects seeking to economize on foundations, and insurance companies worried by subsidence. Householders, however, may fear that permanently wet brickwork will encourage damp, mould and discoloured decor. But Wet Cement, while largely water, will have a low vapour pressure. After all, it is formulated to take up water from the air and hold it. Provided its paint or plaster covering is porous, it will remain in safe hygroscopic equilibrium. A Wet Cemented building may distort strangely under subsidence or land-heave, but will still stand firm, and look smart and house-proud.