Someone said, buried way back in a message I glazed over way too quickly:

>>>>> the upper layer that Bill is working on (a data migration layer)
                                               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
*OH*.

NOW I understand.

Just try to leave enough scraps left over for other people to play with,
please.  (And I'll bet, sometime in the year 00, you'll realize that you
should have gone with a pointer to disk block instead... ;-) )

(See, I *said* that if I knew more about the intended application, I might
understand the solution better...)