On "The Eighth Voyage," Ijon Tichy, arriving at the United Planets General Assembly, swallows "...an informational-translational tablet..." (p. 23) which functions like the diaglossa in Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time, not only interpreting but also informing. (In The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, space travelers put a "babel fish" in one ear.)
I realized that The Star Diaries were less serious and more "humorous" than expected when Tichy "...poured water on the overheated atomic pile..." ("The Seventh Voyage," p. 6) and also had "...a heavy pipe...to stoke the atomic pile..." (p. 16) so I might not find many comparisons to make with Anderson.
Some time travel paradox details:
Tichy is alone in a spaceship but a necessary external repair is a two-man job;
because of a gravitational vortex, the Tichy from tomorrow time travels to today but he and the Tichy of today cannot make the repair because there is only one spacesuit;
the Tichy of today must don the spacesuit and keep it on so that, the next time a Tichy arrives from tomorrow, both will be wearing it;
however, a Tichy from tomorrow cannot help with the repair today if he does not remember that the repair was made today;
instead the Tichy from tomorrow must don the suit so that he will be able to work with a Tichy from his future;
a Tichy trying to get into the suit finds that there is another Tichy already in it;
there is violence between Tichys arguing about which is oldest;
there are so many Tichys that they must form a committee and all of them defer to the one who is visibly oldest;
meanwhile, two child-Tichys use the suit to make the repair, one putting his arms in the legs.
I fail to see how the gravitational vortices drew Tichys from before or after the voyage into the ship but none of this is serious. Both Heinlein and Anderson handle circular causality better than Lem.
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