7
Dale found getting back through the lobby a lot easier than getting into the atrium. The crowds at the convention’s registration booth parted like fog for someone pushing through to the end of the line. At the hotel’s granite-topped registration desk, a handful of harried and desperate-looking clerks struggled to work their way through the couple dozen people lined up to check in. People wore everything from expensive business suits to careful mockups of X-wing pilot uniforms. Torrents of nerds rushed between the hotel’s huge rotating-door entrance and the lobby elevator, dragging suitcases and computers and entire carts of equipment and boxes. So many people were trying to get in that not only was the rotating door fully occupied, the regular doors to either side of it were pretty much
