A curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — a damaged, brainy troublemaker — and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.

The story of a post-apocalyptic dystopian America, barely clinging to capitalist society, where dirty-jobs still need to be done. PUN, our hero, must track down an escaped programmer who holds the future of humankind.