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A group of people land on a distant planet. The hero and heroine explore.
There is a villain. Somehow the three fall into a type of plant that absorbs their flesh but they remain alive.
The villain has a weapon, a knife I think and tries to stab the other two. By then the plant has absorbed them and takes the pair's side and kills the villain.
They reform into humans sustained by the plant.
As noted by Daniel Roseman, this sounds very much like "Four in One" (1953) by Damon Knight. It was included in the 1964 Gollancz collection of Knight's stories In Deep.
A group of people land on a distant planet. The hero and heroine explore.
It's actually a group of four, including the villain:
An hour after that, Meister [the protagonist], Gumbs, Bellis and McCarty had started out across the level cinder and ash left by the transport's tail jets to the nearest living vegetation, six hundred meters away. They were to trace a spiral path outward from the camp site to a distance of a thousand meters, and then return with their specimens—providing nothing too large and hungry to be stopped by machine rifle had previously eaten them.
There is a villain. Somehow the three fall into a type of plant that absorbs their flesh but they remain alive.
The organism digests the bodies of the four of them, except for their nervous systems:
George Meister had once seen the nervous system of a man [...] having seen the specimen, Meister knew what he himself must look like at the present moment.
Of course, there were distortions. For example, he was almost certain that the distance between his visual center and his eyes was now at least thirty centimeters. Also, no doubt, the system as a whole was curled up and spread out rather oddly, since the musculature it had originally controlled was gone; and he had noticed certain other changes which might or might not be reflected by gross structural differences. The fact remained that he—all that he could still call himself—was nothing more than a brain, a pair of eyes, a spinal cord, and a spray of neurons.
The villain has a weapon, a knife I think and tries to stab the other two. By then the plant has absorbed them and takes the pair's side and kills the villain.
McCarty, the Loyalty Monitor, believes that Meister is disloyal and tries to kill him:
"Very well." McCarty's arm rose, with a sharp-pointed fragment of rock clutched in the blobby fingers.
Horrified, George watched it bend backward across the curve of the monster's body. The long, knife-sharp point probed tentatively at the surface three centimeters short of the area over his brain. Then the fist made an abrupt up-and-down movement and a fierce stab of pain shot through him.
The blob creature does eject McCarty's brain as being anti-survival:
Staring around in a vague search for enlightenment, he caught sight of something he hadn't noticed before. Two meters to his left, just visible in the grass, was a damp-looking grayish lump, with a suggestion of a stringy extension trailing off from it.
There must, he decided suddenly, be some mechanism in the Something-or-other meisterii for disposing of tenants who failed to adapt themselves—brains that went into catatonia, or hysteria, or suicidal frenzy. An eviction clause in the lease.
Somehow, Vivian had managed to stimulate that mechanism—to convince the organism that McCarty's brain was not only superfluous but dangerous—"Toxic" was the word.
They reform into humans sustained by the plant.
The first trials were extraordinarily difficult, the rest surprisingly easy. Again and again, they had to let themselves collapse back into an ameboid shape, victims of some omitted or malfunctioning organ, but each failure smoothed the road. They were at last able to stand breathless but breathing, swaying but stable, face to face—two preliminary sketches of self-made Man.
The entire story can be read in the February 1953 issue of Galaxy Magazine at the Internet Archive
