Looking for a short story about space crew who are taken over by an alien consciousness

Question

I think I read it in a collection of horror or SF. The incident happens after landing on an alien planet. It may be Mars. I can not recall a physical entity being involved but somehow one of the crew's consciousness is taken over. The consciousness / point of view shifts from crew member to crew member as the story progresses until all of them have been assimilated. I can not remember how it ends but I don't think any escape. Most likely written pre 2000, I'm guessing anywhere from 1950's to 1990s.

Answer 1

Not much to go on, but your description is reminiscent of "And the Gods Laughed", a 1944 short story by Fredric Brown, which you might have read in one of these compilations. The text of the story is available at Project Gutenberg.

Two spaceship crews are taken over by the alien mind parasites, one on Ganymede, the other in the asteroid belt. The crews are taken over one by one, but there is no shifting point of view in the storytelling. In the following excerpt, an alien-controlled crewman on an asteroid tug is telling, in the guise of a tall tale, the true story of what happened to the Ganymede expedition:

"They didn't have any name for themselves, because they had no language—what you'd really call a spoken or written language—of their own. You see, they were telepathic, and you don't need a language for that. If you tried to translate their thought for themselves, the nearest word you could find for it would be "we"—the first person plural pronoun. Individually, they identified themselves to one another by numbers rather than names.

"And just as they had no language of their own, they had no real bodies of their own, nor active minds of their own. They were parasitic in a sense that earthmen can't conceive. They were entities, apart from—Well, it's difficult to explain, but in a way they had no real existence when not attached to a body they could animate and think with. The easiest way to put it is that a detached—uh—earring god, which is what the Ganymedean natives called them—was asleep, dormant, ineffective. Had no power of thought or motion in itself."

Charlie and Blake were looking bewildered. Charlie said, "You're trying to say, Hank, that when one of them came in contact with a person, they took over that person and ran him and thought with his mind but—uh—kept their own identity? And what happened to the person they took over?"

I said, "As near as I could make out, he stayed there, too, as it were, but was dominated by the entity. I mean, there remained all his memories, and his individuality, but something else was in the driver's seat. Running him. Didn't matter whether he was alive or dead, either, as long as his body wasn't in too bad shape. Like Haynes—they'd had to kill him to put an earring on him. He was dead, in that if that ring was removed, he'd have fallen flat and never got up again, unless it was put back.

"Like the native whose legs had been cut off. The entity running him had decided the body was no longer practicable for use, so he handed himself back to the other native, see? And they'd find another body in better shape for him to use.

"They didn't tell me where they came from, except that it was outside the solar system, nor just how they got to Ganymede. Not by themselves, though, because they couldn't even exist by themselves. They must have got as far as Ganymede as parasites of visitors that had landed there at some time or other. Maybe millions of years ago. And they couldn't get off Ganymede, of course, till we landed there. Space travel hadn't developed on Ganymede—"

The alien narrator's final report:

Portion of telepathic report of No. 67843, on Asteroid J-864A to No. 5463, on Terra:

"As planned, I tested credulity of terrestrial minds by telling them the true story of what happened on Ganymede.

Found them capable of acceptance thereof.

This proves that our idea of embedding ourselves within the flesh of these terrestrial creatures was an excellent one and is essential to the success of our plan. True, this is less simple than our method on Ganymede, but we must continue to perform the operation upon each terrestrial being as we take him over. Bracelets or other appendages would arouse suspicion.

There is no necessity in wasting a month here. I shall now take command of the ship and return. We will report no ore present here. The four of us who will animate the four terrestrials now aboard this ship will report to you on Terra...."