Peter Randa (1911–1979)

On the first manned expedition to Mars the French member of the international crew (our narrator) is examining a plant when two pods burst in his face. The return to Earth is uneventful and, escaping the hullabaloo of their return, the narrator meets up with an old girlfriend in Paris. After a meal and a passionate kiss they return to his hotel room and are both shot dead by the woman's husband.

Two days later they both wake up in the morgue. They discover they can communicate telepathicly, show more and make other people see visions. They also discover that they can alter their own appearance to avoid detection - a form of protective mimicry and when they touch someone that person becomes instantly subservient to their will. The Martians who have invaded their bodies were interrupted in their takeover by having the bodies they were stealing pumped full of Gallic lead and our hero and heroine win the battle to retain their own personalities against their invaders. The authorities, as you can well imagine, are more than a bit suspicious about all this and soon the couple, and the rest of the Martian expedition, are on the run with the authorities determined to destroy what they see as a contagious alien invasion before it spreads. One by one the rest of the expedition their wives and others bought into their circle are killed, or commit suicide, leaving the narrator and his wife still running...

Fin

The story clips along nicely but does grind to a halt near the end when one of the expedition has to info-dump a lot of "what the hell started all this?" and Martian evolutionary history backstory to our narrator. He obtained all this sudden knowledge by hypnotising another minor character between chapters without bothering to tell anyone (or the readers). That comes a bit out of nowhere. But otherwise not badly done. show less

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