"You're the native! The alien will trust you about whether we can do that without prior authorization." Keltham stands, offers her a hand.
(Keltham has noticed where her eyes were drifting, of course. The prior probability for that wasn't low. He would definitely be checking out the hot alien chick's technology, in an appropriately analogized gender-reversed position. He's not much worried about IP theft, though; the real trick to the zipper isn't going to be the interlocking shapes, it's going to be cheaply making ten thousand copies of those interlocking shapes.)