Free Odd Interlude Part Two by Dean Koontz

called him Aladdin, after one of the heroes in
The Thousand and One Nights
. The original Aladdin was able to summon genies from his magic lamp, to do his bidding. Now that I know what this guy is, I sort of understand the half-baked logic of calling him that, but Aladdin himself doesn’t get it. He dislikes the name. He calls himself Ed.
    According to Ed, Fort Wyvern in its prime wasn’t just an army base. Like maybe 5,000 of its 134,000 acres were set aside for all kinds of highly classified spooky projects that weren’t under the control of the army, that were run instead by who knows who and were funded from the federal government’s “black budget,” so they always had more money than Scrooge McDuck, and they could go as crazy as they wanted.
    This place I’ve been exploring has nothing to do with Project Aladdin. This is where they worked on Project Polaris. Just so you know, Polaris is the last star in the handle of the Little Dipper, if it matters. Personally, I think everything matters, even when it doesn’t seem to.
    Project Polaris was built to study alien artifacts, by which I don’t mean things that were brought across the borders from Canada and Mexico. Like ten years earlier, this satellite was conducting geological surveys and searching for possible oil deposits when it identified a ginormous unnatural mass not far off thecoast of California. Navy divers were sent down there, and they discovered a crashed but still watertight flying saucer, although according to Ed, the thing was less like a saucer than it was like a flying wok with an upside-down custard cup where the lid handle should have been and with powdered-sugar dredgers where the bowl handles should have been, which frankly I can’t quite picture.
    As you might imagine, the government was hot to study this historic find, so they paid a two-billion-dollar bonus in advance to the security-cleared contractor—he was the husband of a senator—to finish this underground facility in one year. By then, Fort Wyvern had been closed a long time and housed no military personnel, but its isolation made it an even more suitable location for deep-black projects. Because of the reckless pace of construction, three times as many workmen died on the job as had died in accidents during the building of Hoover Dam. Some were crushed, some were blown up, some were run down by machinery, some were skewered or beheaded, some were electrocuted. One guy died during an argument with a union boss, when he fell into the excavation for a footing and was drowned in twenty tons of concrete. According to Ed, all of the dead were buried at the government’s expense and were presented with a posthumous medal for something or other. Their spouses and children received lifetime passes granting free admission to all national parks, plus a 23 percent discount on refreshments and souvenirs purchased therein.
    Anyway, one of the weird artifacts taken from the alien ship and hauled here to Wyvern with bust-your-gut difficulty is the silvery sphere that I can see now through the big windows of this observation room.
    Dr. Norris Hiskott has nothing to do with the sphere. He worked in another part of this facility, studying the bodies of the crew of the flying-wok thing. He was super-interested in their DNA. As anyone would expect—anyone but the government, I guess—something went just horribly wrong, and the ETs’ genetic material somehow began to sneak into Dr. Hiskott’s body, with him not even aware of it for a while. You have to wonder if some highly educated people are really as smart as they’re supposed to be.
    So one day Hiskott is working in his lab with two assistants who must have been just as brilliant as he was, and suddenly three of his fingernails drop off, as if they were glued on and the glue went bad. Everyone is startled, and as an assistant picks up one of the nails, another nail drops off, then two more, then the last four, it’s like raining