cases, overflow the allocated result object by 1 bit.  In such cases,
it would have been brought back into range if we subtracted al*bl and
ah*bh from it first, but I don't want to do that because it hurts cache
behavior.  Instead we just ignore the excess bit when it appears -- in
effect, this is forcing unsigned mod BASE**(asize + bsize) arithmetic
in a case where that doesn't happen all by itself.