The bait shop was a small wooden building next to a gas station just outside of the Mission City limits. The bell dangling from the rickety screen door jangled when MacGyver pushed it open, but no one inside gave him and Sam a second glance. The shelves inside were cram-packed with lures, tackle boxes, spare reels, rolls of fishing line, artificial bait, baseball caps, snacks, and anything else a person ready for a fishing trip could ever need. Large coolers along the back wall held soft drinks along with plastic containers of live bait ready for a hook, and the buckets of crickets on the front counter filled the room with almost as much noise as the clusters of old-timers who were gathered around to buy lunch and chat about the weather.

MacGyver lifted his hand in greeting to a few of them, who nodded back politely.
Sam followed behind him, eyes and ears open for any sign of a clue. When he noticed something behind the counter, he tugged at Mac’s shirtsleeve urgently. “Dad, look! See on that bulletin board over there? It’s a flyer about that algae stuff.”
The two of them stepped up to the counter for a closer look. “This flyer is dated from three months ago,” Mac observed. “How long exactly has this been going on?”

“How long has what been going on?” asked the cashier, who was walking behind the counter as they were looking at the board.

“The blue-green algae blooms,” MacGyver replied. “There’s one in Lower Mission Lake right now.”

She nodded, bleached-blonde ponytail bobbing up and down. “Yeah, Lower Mission’s been getting hit pretty hard, but then, a lot of the other lakes in the county have, too. It’s been off and on for the past, I don’t know, four months or so.”
“Four months?!” Sam exclaimed. “That long? Why hasn’t anybody done something about it?”

The woman shrugged. “We talked to the Department of Fish & Wildlife about it, but they said there isn’t much to do. Said it was probably a combination of the warm weather and fertilizer runoff from some of the local farms.”

“There aren’t that many farms around here,” Mac said thoughtfully.

“There’s got to be something we can do!” protested Sam.

The blonde cashier shrugged. “Don’t know. Just be real careful when you decide whether or not to eat the fish. And don’t drink the water. Get some water bottles and don’t take a swim with your mouth open. They treat the stuff that comes out of the reservoir---even though it tastes like dirt---but the lake water’s no good. I know I stay far away from all the lakes when they’ve got that algae stuff in them.”

As she turned to help another customer, Sam turned to MacGyver. “C’mon, Dad, it’s in the drinking water, for crying out loud! We’ve gotta help somehow.”

“Maybe we can try talking to the Fish & Wildlife guys ourselves,” MacGyver suggested. “Get a few more details. If agricultural runoff is really causing this much trouble, then there might be a couple of temporary fixes we could work on until they find a permanent solution.”

“Whatever you say, Dad. As long as we’re trying. I don’t know how everyone else around here can just sit still when the lakes are in trouble.”

“Not everyone,” came a voice from behind MacGyver.

MacGyver turned to see a teenaged boy in a bright green ball cap peeking at them from behind a rack of fishing rods. The kid couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and he skittishly glanced around the store before slipping over to Mac and Sam.

“I’m sorry for listening in on your conversation, but---it was kinda hard not to,” the kid said.

“Sorry,” Sam said sheepishly. “I guess I got a little carried away.”

“No, it’s not that, it’s just that I heard you asking about the cyanobacteria. I’m really upset about it, too. My name’s Jake. Hi.”

“My name’s MacGyver, and this is my son Sam. What do you know about the blooms?”

“Uh---” Jake frowned and glanced around the store again. “You wanna talk about this later? I have some friends who’re gonna meet me in the park later. They’re concerned about this stuff, too. Will you guys meet up with us there? I can give you directions if you need it.”

Mac smiled. “Nah, I grew up here---I know where the park is. Who exactly are your friends?”

Jake straightened up and folded his arms. “Only the premier scientific organization for young people in Mission City today!”

MacGyver lifted an eyebrow. “You mean the high school astronomy club?”

Jake deflated. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Because I’m the one who first came up with all that ‘premier scientific organization’ stuff back when I went to school here. Nice to see that I’m still remembered.”

Sam stifled a laugh. “Dad, you’re such a geek.”

“Well, anyway, we’re the Earth and Space Club now,” Jake replied loftily.

“Astronomy wasn’t a broad enough term for all the projects we wanted to do, so we changed it up a little.”

“And you guys want one of your projects to be cleaning up the cyanobacteria?”

MacGyver said. “That’s a great goal, but I’m warning you now: it won’t be easy.”

“Trust me, we know,” Jake answered nervously. “Just meet us at the pavilion in the park after school---four o’clock, okay?”

“Okay,” MacGyver said, watching as Jake stuffed his hands in his pockets and hurried from the store.

“That was weird. Did it seem weird to you?” Sam said.

“He seemed anxious about something,” Mac observed. “Wonder what it is that has him so on edge?”

“We’re gonna check it out, right?”

“Of course.” MacGyver bumped his shoulder against Sam’s. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

The pavilion in the Mission City Community Park was just a small wooden structure set on a concrete foundation. The roof slats let water leak through onto the picnic tables when it rained, but the beams were sturdy enough, so no one bothered to fix it. Except for MacGyver, who made a mental note to volunteer to reinforce the old roof before he left town.

As he and Sam approached the pavilion, they could see a cluster of ten or twelve high school kids hanging out, backpacks on the table and skateboards propped up beside them.

“Do you think they’re actually going to be able to help us?” Sam asked.

“Only one way to find out,” MacGyver replied. “Just like when you’re chasing down a lead for your articles---you’ve got to check out every possible source, right?”

Sam grinned. “Right!”

As they walked closer, Jake noticed them and waved, jumping to his feet and meeting them halfway. “I told everyone that you were coming,” he said. “I knew you would. I’ll get Alix, our club president.”

As the teen raced back to his friends---chartreuse cap bouncing every step of the way---and started talking to a pretty brunette girl in a softball t-shirt, Sam looked at MacGyver.

Alix? he mouthed.

MacGyver shrugged. “Maybe it’s short for something.”

The athletic brunette was standing in front of them within seconds, with several other kids clustering around to listen in.

“I’m Alix. Hi. Nice to meet you.”

Sam nodded politely. “Nice to meet you guys, too. I’m Sam. This is my dad. He goes by MacGyver.”

Alix watched the two of them carefully. “Jake said you guys were asking about the algae in the lakes around here?”

“That’s right,” Mac replied, silently impressed by the way the other teens fell silent when the young girl spoke. “We went down to Lower Mission for some fishing earlier today and came across a pretty serious bloom. Do you know anything about what might be causing it?”

Alix folded her arms neatly across her chest. “Maybe. Why do you want to know? Nobody else around here cares about why it’s happening or what we think about it. Why should you?”

“I grew up here,” Mac answered. “I used to go fishing in these lakes with my grandpa Harry. Mission City is important to me. Not to mention that fixing this problem is the right thing to do. Isn’t that reason enough?”

Sam glanced around at the group of teens as many of them murmured their approval. One of them, a particularly tall boy, nudged Alix in the shoulder and said, “They sound all right to me. Maybe they can get the city council to listen to us. It’ll help to have some older adults on our side.”

Sam smirked and glanced sideways at MacGyver. “Hear that, Dad?” he muttered teasingly. “It helps to have older adults on their side.”

“They mean you, too, ya know,” Mac said pointedly before fixing his attention on the teens again. “We’ll be happy to help you in any way we can, but you’ve got to help us first. What do you know about all this? Have you found anything out?”

“Yes and no,” Alix said. “Fish & Wildlife say it’s an agricultural thing, but we’ve figured out that there aren’t enough farms around here for the fertilizer to be causing it. Besides, the blooms started way too early in the season for the runoff to be that bad.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” MacGyver said thoughtfully. “There’s got to be a secondary factor.”

“We think there might be,” said the tall boy who’d backed them up earlier. “But we don’t have any proof.”

“Well, what is it?” Sam demanded.

The tall boy hesitated, and several of the teens looked at each other silently. “It’s kind of a big accusation.”

“We think it's the fish hatchery,” Jake blurted. “The new one that they built on Wolf Creek Road. Two months after they showed up, the Cyanobacteria showed up, too.”

“But like we said, we have no proof,” Alix said. “All we know is that we volunteered there a whole lot, and we saw some kinda weird stuff.”

“What kind of weird stuff?” Sam asked, intently focused on the teens.

MacGyver had to smile. Leaning forward like that, with his shoulders hunched and his mouth set into a determined line, Mac could easily envision Sam as a hardboiled reporter from the 1950s, chasing down leads with a notepad and a camera until there was nothing left to learn.

Alix shrugged. “I mean, everything was okay for the first few weeks or so, but then sometimes when we cleaned out the tanks, we started noticing that there were more dead fish than there used to be.”

“And fewer fry to start out with,” the tall boy added. “It’s like the fish just stopped having as many eggs, or that the eggs just stopped hatching.”

Another girl in the group nodded. “And some of the fish got sick. Like, really sick, not just from being in close quarters with lots of other animals. I know, because I was charting their behavior over the first three months for my AP Biology project.”

Sam tapped his chin, rolling the information around in his mind. “So you’re thinking that the fish got sick or contaminated or whatever while they were still in the hatchery?”

“And then the contaminated fish spread the bacteria into the river and lake waters where they were stocked,” Mac finished. “The continual influx of fish would explain why the blooms keep recurring. After one bloom dies off, there are more bacteria to replace it, and the existing environmental factors keep feeding them.”

“Exactly,” Alix said. “That’s our theory, anyway. But there’s no proof, and we have no way to get it. Especially since the hatchery doesn’t let us volunteer very much anymore.”

“They don’t?” Sam frowned.

Jake nodded. “The head biologist said that they just didn’t need us, but we think that he was catching on to us getting suspicious.”

“Could be,” MacGyver said slowly. “We’ve got to think of something.”

“Later,” Alix said. “Right now, we’ve got worked to do. We volunteered to replace this sucky roof.” She pointed upwards towards the ramshackle pavilion.

MacGyver smiled. “Sounds like you read my mind. Need a hand?”

The sun was starting to dip beneath the western half of the sky by the time the pavilion roof was fixed and MacGyver’s Jeep pulled into the fish hatchery parking lot. Sam was the first to roll out of the car, drinking in his surroundings with a practiced eye. He wasn’t really sure what he’d expected a fish hatchery to be like, but he hadn’t counted on it being a cheerful-looking stone building with budding flower beds out front.

He heard MacGyver’s car door slam behind him and scratched his head, looking up at the fresh-painted sign. “I guess it’s still open. I didn’t think it would be so…nice.”

Mac shrugged. “Sometimes appearances can be deceiving. Other times, not. Only one way to find out.” He gestured toward the glass front doors.

Sam nodded and took the lead, peeking into the wide lobby and catching the eye of the uniformed woman at the front desk.

“Hello! Can I help you?” she asked as she plucked a stray thread from her green polo shirt.

“We’d like a tour,” Mac said, gesturing to the billboard behind her.

“Oh! I’m sorry. The last tour stopped fifteen minutes ago.”

“Awww, that’s too bad,” Sam said sadly, flashing her with his patented puppy dog eyes. “I was really hoping that we could take a look around and see some of the fish. My dad just loves fish. He wanted to be an ichthyologist, back before he hit his head and got that traumatic brain injury. He forgot everything he learned in college and had to become a janitor instead. It would’ve broken his heart, if he could’ve remembered what his dream had been in the first place.”

The woman blinked and glanced furtively at MacGyver, who was struggling to keep an impassive look on his face. “Well, you can still feel free to look around the visitor’s center and the fish tanks, even without a tour guide. The younger fish are inside, and the rest are outside. Just follow the signs.” She pointed and shuffled some brochures on the desk, obviously pretending to be busy.

“I’m gonna get you for that, Sam,” Mac muttered as soon as they were out of earshot.

Sam grinned. “Aw, c’mon, Dad, you know it was all in good fun.”

“Sure I do, but don’t go wishing my life away yet! Head injuries aren’t anything to joke about. After all, I’m probably only a couple of concussions away from having to retire or something, and then you’d be stuck taking care of me.”

Nonplussed, Sam shook his head, idly examining some of the informative posters on the life cycle of fish. “Don’t worry, I think you’ve still got a few good years left in you.”

“Sure.” MacGyver paused for dramatic effect. “But now I’ve got to get revenge on ya.”

“Do your worst, Dad!” Sam’s laugh trailed off when he crossed from the visitor’s center into a large warehouse-like area. The cinderblock walls were painted a mint green, and long concrete troughs full of filtered water were arranged in rows that filled the entire room. “Are all of these tanks filled with baby fish? Every single one of them?!” He darted from trough to trough, peeking down into the running water. “There are so many of them! Fish eggs, little fries… Is ‘fries’ the plural for baby fish, or is it just ‘fry?’”

“I have no idea,” MacGyver replied, watching with amusement.

Sam hesitated for a moment. “Fry,” he said firmly after thinking it over. “Fries sounds too much like fast food.” He shook his head. “Look at all of them! And they’re orange!”

“Pretty cute, huh?” Mac said, looking down into one of the tanks. “I don’t see anything out of the ordinary so far. We should go check the outside part to be sure.”

“Huh?” Sam’s head popped up. “Oh, right. Let’s go.”

MacGyver led his son out another set of glass doors to the outdoor tanks. Set in a wide concrete courtyard, more rows of trough-like tanks held hundreds of growing trout and walleye.

“Wow. I never knew that places like this kept so many fish here,” Sam said.
MacGyver nodded. “A lot of them won’t survive to adulthood, and the ones that do will likely end up as food for a predator, like a bird of prey.”

“Ouch.”

“It’s part of life, Sam.”

“I don’t see anything weird yet. Except for the fish moving towards me whenever I get close. They probably want food.”

MacGyver leaned over the tanks, inspecting the fish carefully. “They seem all right to me so far. Let’s check the ones on the far end.” The closer he got to the far rows of tanks, the more his heart sank. He could see from far away that some of the tanks were covered with a thick, gelatinous slime. “Six tanks. Looks like the bacteria found its way into six tanks.”

Sam hovered by his father’s elbow, a worried frown marring his face. “Do you think it could get into the tanks with the healthy fish?”

“It probably already has,” Mac said grimly. “We need to find out if the biologists in charge know about this---and if they do, what they plan to do about it.”

“Where do you think we’ll find them?”

Wordlessly, MacGyver paced back inside the hatchery, past the troughs of newborn fish, and through a whitewashed door marked “Employees Only.”

“Uh, Dad?” Sam hurried to follow him.

After a quick survey of the short corridor, Mac spotted what he was looking for: an office door. The nameplate read “Dr. Will Phelps, Biologist,” but MacGyver barely had time to read it before he tested the knob. The door opened and he marched inside.

There was a sandy-haired man with a thick beard sitting at the desk, and he peered up from his computer when MacGyver and Sam walked in. He stared at them in confusion from behind his horn-rimmed glasses.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the biologist said, “but visiting hours are almost over. If you’ll just go back to the front lobby, the receptionist will---”

“We’re not here because of that,” MacGyver replied, trying to sound non-threatening but firm. “We’re actually here to talk to you and maybe ask for help.”

“Help?” Phelps echoed. “What do you need?”

“Are you aware that infestations of Cyanobacteria have been repeatedly showing up in Mission City’s water supply?” MacGyver said.

Phelps stared at them a moment longer before coughing and saying, “Of course I’m aware. Everybody knows about it.” After a beat, he added, “And it makes my job more difficult. Hard to keep the lakes stocked when there are so many fish kills out there.”

“What about the fish kills that are happening inside this facility?” MacGyver asked quietly.

His question was a bluff and he knew it; he still had no hard evidence that the scientists were in any way involved with the Cyanobacteria problem, and Phelps could easily deny any involvement with the issue. But over the years, Mac had gotten to be a pretty good judge of body language and an even better judge of character. Unless Phelps was very good at hiding things, his reaction would tell Mac the truth.

The biologist shifted in his chair, adjusting the lapels of his starched white lab coat. “To tell you the truth, our population numbers fluctuate from year to year. That’s normal for a facility of this size. The Cyanobacteria blooms have no effect on---”

“The bacteria blooms have affected six of your tanks outside, and those are the ones that are large enough to be visible,” Mac argued. “If there’s a problem preventing contamination, maybe we can help.”

“We don’t have a problem here,” Phelps said, getting to his feet and crossing his arms. “There aren’t any issues at all. This facility runs perfectly. Now please---visiting hours are over and we’re closed. Please make your way to the front lobby. Official personnel only are allowed back here.”

As MacGyver filed out of the building with Sam in tow, he mulled over the details of the conversation in his mind.

“What are you thinking about, Dad?” Sam asked hesitantly.

“He’s hiding something,” MacGyver replied, deep in thought. “I’m sure of it.”

“I think so, too. But what?”

“I have no idea.” He unlocked the Jeep and the two of them got inside.

“We need to get back in there,” Sam said. “Find out what it is.”

“I want to do that, too, but something tells me they won’t be allowing us in there again.”

Sam shrugged. “So we’ll find another way in. We can pick locks. Security should be pretty easy here. After all, who in their right mind would break into a bunch of big fish tanks?”

MacGyver dropped his keys and stared at his son, appalled. “Sam, we can’t just break in! That’s illegal!”

“So we’ll do it through the proper channels. You introduced me to your friend with the police. You can ask him to help investigate.”

Mac retrieved his keys and shook his head. “I have no doubt that Neil would do that for me, but I’m not going to ask him to. Not when he won’t have enough probable cause for a search warrant. After all, what can I tell him? That I think a biologist is hiding something about bacteria in the water, but I have no physical evidence? I’m just as upset about this as you are, Sam, but the most we could do would be to accuse them of not maintaining their tanks properly, and even if that’s wrong, it’s not against any laws.”

“What about public endangerment or something?”

“We can’t prove that they’re doing anything intentionally. They could easily claim that the lakes infected their facility instead of the other way around---even if that is pretty unlikely. We just need more proof!” Frustrated, Mac banged his fist against the steering wheel.

“My gut says that whatever they’re up to with that bacteria, it is intentional,” Sam said. “And my gut is never wrong. There’s a story here, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

MacGyver sighed. “You’re right, Sam. But whatever that story is, it’s got to wait until tomorrow. We’re out of leads and out of daylight. We’ll get some rest and in the morning, we can look at this problem with fresh eyes.”
Sam nodded reluctantly. “Yeah. Fresh eyes.”

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