The crippled Cosmoband had been snapped up in one of Mondiale’s legendary acquisition frenzies. This treatment only added to Cosmoband’s troubles. Mondiale’s brass ignored the company, because it lacked any go-go stock-booming growth rates. All the original Cosmoband rocket engineers had run away. Cosmoband’s remaining people were a rabble of cheap hucksters. They offered their so-called Interplanetary Internet in tiny back-page ads in Popular Mechanics and Scientific American.