Just to keep you posted, I'm still not sure what goes wrong when asdf- install tries to read the ASD file for Albert while testing. When I try:
sbcl --load "startup.lisp"
I get a simple-error. The error occurs within the error handler that AIT wraps around the call to ASDF-Install but doesn't seem to be catching the error. That's probably a misdiagnosis and I'll look into more soon.