...of defence

Rumfoord went on insisting for several hours that Billy had echolalia - told nurses and a doctor that Billy had echolalia now. Some experiments were performed on Billy. Doctors and nurses tried to get Billy to echo something, but Billy wouldn't make a sound for them.

'He isn't doing it now,' said Rumfoord peevishly. 'The minute you go away, he'll start doing it again.'

Nobody took Rumfoords diagnosis seriously. The staff thought Rumfoord was a hateful old man, conceited and cruel. He often said to them, in one way or another, that people who were weak deserved to die. Whereas the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die.

There in the hospital, Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in time of war: He was trying to prove to a wilfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to see and hear. He kept silent until the lights went out at night, and then, when there had been a long period of silence containing nothing to echo, he said to Rumfoord, 'I was in Dresden when it was bombed. I was a prisoner of war.'

[Slaughterhouse 5, Vonnegut, K.]